Felicity Lawrence, in the extract from her book which you published, wrongly implies that breakfast cereals have low nutritional value (The hidden truth about your breakfast, June 14).

I work for the Association of Cereal Food Manufacturers, which helps these companies explain the role they play in our diet. Breakfast cereals encourage us to start the day healthily, but anyone reading that article might subsequently choose to skip their breakfast, and conceivably do themselves more nutritional harm than good.

Breakfast cereals are not "degraded foods that have to have goodness artificially restored". You cannot eat wheat or oats without milling them - the same applies to bread, cakes and biscuits. Typically they are high in carbohydrates, so may improve mental performance in the morning, and a bowl normally supplies fewer than 200 calories.

The British have not "succumbed almost entirely to this American invention". Globally, more people are choosing to eat cereal because it is a convenient and quick first meal of the day. If you eat cereal with low-fat milk, you consume fewer calories and higher levels of vitamins and minerals than alternatives such as high-fat cooked breakfasts or toast with spread and jam. They are also better than eating nothing. And many parents will tell you they often provide the only opportunity to get children to consume milk (and even with milk they are typically low in fat).

The assertion that fortification replaces "micronutrients from the raw ingredients ... either destroyed by the process or stripped away" is misleading. Fortification is not a bad thing: the government recommends it, and in any case not all cereals are fortified. In general they provide up to one third of the intake of iron, riboflavin, vitamin D and calcium. Nor are they high in the chemical compound acrylamide - the Food Standards Industry 2005 survey clearly indicated that levels in breakfast cereals are insignificantly low.

Breakfast cereals are not "little more than sugary junk", nor are they high in salt. A bowl typically provides around 5% of your daily sugar intake and, on average, cereals contain less than 5% of our dietary salt intake. Even so, the industry collaborated with the Food Standards Agency to reduce levels by more than 40% in a decade.

The Which? Cereal Reoffenders survey quoted in the article was widely criticised at the time because it was simplistic and subjective. It still is. For example, it criticised products such as muesli for sugar content when the sugar was largely derived from dried fruits. As the report acknowledged, dried fruit contributes directly towards the government's recommended "five-a-day" portion guidelines for fruit and vegetables.

In reality, cereal companies are highly competitive and offer a wide range of choice for those who are pressured for time and want to eat healthily. You can easily enjoy a bowl of cereal for as little as 20p - a very small price to pay for such an important, nutritious meal. Lawrence's argument presents a picture of an industry manipulating our diets. Nothing could be further from the truth.

· James Laird is a consultant to the Association of Cereal Food Manufacturers
james.laird@munroforster.com