Exposing children to secondary bad chart design is bad for their health

Yes, *sniff*, our kids are being desensitized to poor data visualization.

Check out this craptacular chart from the back of a Cheerios box:

cheerios.jpg

I would have had soooo much fun critically evaluating this, but Carl beat me to it already:

First of all, every condition shows a decline in concentration overall - with 8am as the benchmark! I can’t concentrate on walking at 8am! Downhill from that is comatose!! And what is this poisonous rubbish that causes such appalling degradation of intellectual activity? First up, a glucose drink! The breakfast of champions! Who hasn’t left the house of a morning, pausing only to swallow down a couple of cans of Tango or Lucozade? I’m reminded of Bill Bryson’s “Rated FIRST against the Ford El Crappo for safety!” diatribe on advertising - if a glucose drink is the only competition then Cheerios can’t be doing too well against anything more sensible. But wait! Sugary energy drinks aren’t the only competition! The other condition is.. no breakfast! Which actually beats Cheerios in the first half hour! Clearly, the subjects were still mulling over the pseudo-scientific crap they’d just read on the Cheerios box and couldn’t concentrate on.. whatever it was they were given. In the end, of course Cheerios come out on top but it hardly tells you anything you didn’t know before - as the only solid food in the experiment you might equally read the result as,

Cheerios - better for you than starvation.

 

Won’t someone think of the children? The WORLD IS FALLING APART PEOPLE! While you’re sitting there every morning, dressed in your smelly nightclothes with frizzled bed hair flying in all directions, hunched over your life-awakening elixir of coffee like it’s some sort of sacred idol, your kids are pounding Red Bull and losing 0.06 seconds of reaction time by 11:30 am every morning!

You oughta be ashamed of yourselves.

1 Response to “Exposing children to secondary bad chart design is bad for their health”


  • I wouldn’t be too harsh on the designer of this chart or the marketing team. They were probably paid in “Cheerios” and as such were unable to properly concentrate on the task at hand.

    Not to mention that some of the psychological effects of the color “brown” are known to be (among others): An association with dirt, poverty, dullness, and filth.

    That’s why I eat nothing for breakfast. At least I know what’s NOT going into my body!

Leave a Reply