Have you ever felt a tug at your sleeve--or perhaps, a less-subtle behavior--when strolling the cereal aisle in the supermarket with your child?

Cereal makers spend about $229 million a year advertising cereals to children, hoping to get them to beg their parents for their favorite brands. But are they worth it?

We recently rated the top 27 cereals marketed to kids and found most of them had a lot of room for improvement. Only four, Cheerios, Kix, Life and Honey Nut Cheerios ranked Very Good. And an international study that we participated in found that several U.S. cereals had more sugar and sodium than their counterparts in other participating countries.

According to a Federal Trade Commission report, food manufacturers are well aware that the "nag factor" is an important element in marketing to children. But the cereals that are marketed so heavily to kids also happen to be nutritionally inferior to other cereals, containing more calories, sodium, and sugar overall, according to an April 2008 study in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. "Children's cereals have little of the nutrients that we want to increase in their diets, and too much of those we're trying to limit," says the study's lead author, Marlene B. Schwartz, Ph.D., deputy director for the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University.

Read the rest of this post on our Health blog, and see our full cereal Ratings and report for more information.