GMO-Free Cheerios Have Fewer Vitamins

The makers of Cheerios and Grape Nuts hope to win over health-conscious consumers by ditching genetically modified ingredients in their cereals. The problem is that Food Navigator read the fine print on the new boxes and found that each has fewer vitamins. With Cheerios, for instance, the cereal went from providing 25% of the daily value of vitamin B2 (riboflavin) to 2%. Or as a professor of crop science puts it, the cereal "went from being a major source of vitamin B2 to being almost zip."

Grape Nuts, meanwhile, no longer has vitamins A, D, B12, and B2. What's going on? Neither General Mills nor Post offered an explanation, "but the reason likely has to do with the difficulty of sourcing vitamins from non-genetically modified sources," says LiveScience. For example, vitamins are often produced using micro-organisms kept in fermentation tanks that are fed "feed stock" that comes from crops such as corn; it's not always easy to certify that the stock is also GMO-free. (In other genetically modified news, click to read about a new potato.)