The announcement by Kellogg today that it will improve the nutritional value of cereals marketed to kids is long overdue and should be celebrated. But there is a long way to go.

Packaged American food is mostly crap nowadays. And the good stuff is very, very hard to find amid crowded store shelves and misleading labels. You almost have to be a scientist to find food that is good for you. I’m no health nut, but we’re talking about the difference between having energy and being trim vs. being fat, depressed and needing a sugar fix every few hours. I cannot comprehend how parents can feed this junk to their children and not feel like criminals.

All nutrition experts agree that sugar is overtaking other foods in kids’ diets, making them fat and exposing them to much greater risk of diabetes and other health problems. Soda, for example, has replaced milk as a stable in kids’ diets.

Two tricks the bread and cereal industries play on you:

1. “Whole grain” is almost meaningless. It can mean white flour (which is stripped of its natural nutrients and fiber) with a tidbit of authentic and healthy whole grain tossed in as a lesser ingredient. Look for labels that say “100% Whole Wheat.”

Backing me up on this is Susan Yanovski, director of the Obesity and Eating Disorders Program at the National Institutes of Health: “You have to become a label reader. Look on the label, and one of the first few ingredients should say something like ‘whole wheat’ or ‘whole grain.’ It should be one of the first ingredients, and it should have the word ‘whole’ in it.”

2. Seemingly healthy bread is often loaded with sugar. This might surprise you. Look at the labels. Sugar is often the second ingredient. And sometimes it’s third (perhaps high fructose corn syrup), but then it’s also fourth (maybe brown sugar or just sugar), which means there’s a lot more sugar in there than they want you to realize. The sugar is often added to remove the bitter taste that whole grains tend to have.

I recently surveyed the bread aisle, pen and paper in hand, at my local supermarket. Most brands had both good and bad products plus a full range between.

There were 24 true whole wheat bread products. However, 15 of those use sugar as a prime ingredient, typically second or third on the list.

Cereal manufacturers play the same trick. Kid’s cereals often say “Whole Grain” to appeal to parents, but the cereals are usually loaded with sickening amounts of sugar. A box of Cheerios, for example, has eight separate and prominent health claims, from “can help lower cholesterol” to “low in fat.” However: Sugar, honey and brown sugar syrup are numbers 2, 5 and 6 on the ingredient list.

The smart thing to do: Look for products with short ingredients lists. And teach your kids to like real bread and real cereal without all the excess sugar, unless you want them to be fat and sick and lacking the nutrients needed for normal growth. I often wonder if I’d be an inch or two taller were it not for all those Fruit Loops in the ’60s.