One of the food scares of the moment - and there's always something - is about breakfast cereals: the reliable old pap and milk combo that you can shove into a hungry child without too much argument, knowing they'll bounce off to school with at least the beginnings of a day's balanced nutrition in them. Now we need to worry about that, too.

The British eat more breakfast cereal than anyone else in Europe - 95 per cent of households have at least one packet in their cupboards. Cupboards? In our house it is more of a cereal library: yesterday morning it had eight brands, including fun-packs of Frosties used for child bribery. (Having grown up on them, I can confirm that Frosties are only a slightly better way to start the day than a cup of sugar moistened with milk. My dentist agrees.) Our shelf of adult cereals, the sort that make you feel fit and wise just for buying them, includes Weetabix, Special K, Quaker Oats Granola, whole grain Cheerios and Rice Krispies Multi-Grain, “with a natural prebiotic”. I liked it when they just said “snap, crackle, pop”.

Cheerios, according to their website, “can help jumpstart your metabolism to fire up your busy day”. Felicity Lawrence's fascinating new book Eat Your Heart Out lists some other glorious claims from the breakfast cereal industry: Grape-Nuts were once sold as “brain food” and as a cure for consumption and malaria. The original Mr Kellogg hoped that his products would prevent masturbation. Others were said to make your blood cooler, or even redder. These don't sound so very much more unlikely than the Rice Krispies promise “to help keep kids' tummies healthy”. “Jumpstarting your metabolism” can reliably be achieved with a double espresso and a Marlboro Light.

Cereals are, of course, loaded with salt and sugar. According to the back of my packet of whole grain Cheerios, one bowl with milk contains two-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar, even before you've put the sugar on. In fact, according to the Food Standards Agency, all the adult cereals in my cupboard (except Weetabix) are officially “high in sugar”, because they have more than 10g of it per 100g. The Cheerios have double that. And the salt? The Kellogg managing director admitted to Lawrence: “The risk is, if you take the salt out, you might be better off eating the cardboard carton for taste.” Fair enough - but my three-year-old usually demands two bowls of cereal. Most of the brands in our cupboard give her half the salt that she should be eating in an entire day, by the FSA's recommendations.

But that's an old cereal scare. The new one is “cereal could give you cancer”. Lawrence says that the processing of cereals produces a substance called acrylamide. Consume more than 40 micrograms a day, and a woman's chances of getting cancer of the ovary or womb are apparently doubled. An average bowl of cereal contains 9 micrograms of acrylamide - so stop at the fourth bowl.

I'm not taking this too seriously: if you took all food scares to heart, you'd be very hungry. And to avoid acrylamide entirely, you'd have to give up roasting, baking or frying your foods. I'm swayed a little, too, by Tom Sanders, the head of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London. He defends cereals in an age in which one child in eight goes to school with no breakfast: “Their nutritional value comes from the vitamins and minerals added, and most importantly from the milk they are consumed with.”

Perhaps food scares should come with a warning label. It would read: “Rickets is rare in this country these days. We eat more cheaply and with far greater choice than has any generation of human beings before us. Be grateful. Enjoy.”

Thanks to all of you who e-mailed me with your sure-fire chanterelle-picking spots. So generous, except for the reader who said that now he'd told me, he'd have to kill me. One fungus-head reported from the Lubéron that chanterelles in the hypermarché are just €9 a kilo (compared with up to £45 here). I also received several accounts of restaurants trying to pass off basic mushrooms as something wild or special. Thanks for letting me know - but you really have to tell the manager, too. When, oh when, will the British learn to complain in restaurants?

alex.renton@thetimes.co.uk

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