Bran flakes have been frosted, an official, factory-applied embellishment, and sugar’s triumph is at last complete.

The outcome was all but inevitable, of course.

Sugar’s ubiquity is of long standing, its infiltration of our foods as inexorable as its assault on our collective dental enamel.

And although its presence in the breakfast cereal aisle is particularly prodigious, sugar sprinkles a wide swath of sweetness across America’s smorgasbord.

(The cereal makers would prefer, however, that you not associate their products with an ingredient as controverisal as sugar. Which is why, in the more health-conscious era that started in the 1980s, the indubitably scrumptious Sugar Smacks were magically transformed into the bucolic Honey Smacks. The sugar content, I scarcely need to note, did not change even as smiling bees were added to the cereal box design.)

Sugar also makes significant, but not so well-known, contributions to quite a lot of other products, ranging from ketchup to sliced white bread.

I refer to sugar in its generic sense.

These days the most common version in processed food is not the snowy white granules that some of us — which is to say, me — like to dump copiously on any cereal that isn’t pre-frosted. Food companies prefer the cheaper but still cloyingly sweet corn syrup — including the beleaguered high-fructose variety that the nattering nabobs of nutrition have gotten so worked up about.

High-fructose corn syrup offers little besides calories, to be sure (in common with other forms of sugar). But if you don’t approach some of the more hysterical condemnations with appropriate skepticism you might wonder whether the corporations are larding our pantries and refrigerators with the 21st century equivalent of strontium 90 from nuclear test fallout.

Among the holdouts, the bastions of nutritional defiance as sugar and its lab-derived cousins conquered almost every grocery nook and cranny, were a smattering of cereals that touted their abundance of whole grain and its attendant wholesome benefits.

(Among these benefits the, well, regularity of certain biological necessities that fiber contributes to. Fiber is undeniably good for us, and most of us apparently don’t get enough of it, but the obsession with its nearly miraculous gastrointestinal qualities was most cleverly, and hilariously, lampooned in the “Saturday Night Live” commercial skit for a cereal called, inevitably, Colon Blow.)

Many of the cereals that soldiered on without being heavily adulterated with sugar are made primarily of bran.

Bran is the part of grains that is often discarded during the production of processed food.

Naturally it contains much that contributes to our good health, including the aforementioned fiber.

Equally obvious, bran flakes are pretty bland. This merely confirms the axiom that many things which give us pleasure psychologically have the opposite effect physically.

In particular, bran, whether in flake or other form, is not sweet.

This deficiency is easily remedied, of course — this is why we have (or at least should have) a container in the kitchen or on the table filled with granulated sugar.

But now Kellogg’s, perhaps reaching the reasonable conclusion that many of its customers are already compensating for bran flakes’ lack of flavor, has spared us even the middling task of sprinkling sugar on our milk-moistened flakes.

The company’s new Frosted Bran gets much the same treatment as does Tony the Tiger’s favorite, Frosted Flakes.

I recently sampled this new cereal.

It is tasty, although not at all in the same way as, say, Cinnamon Toast Crunch or the aforementioned Honey Smacks.

The flakes exude the nutty flavor that distinguishes bran, and they retain the satisfying heft, when crunched between molars, that I suppose explains in part why the stuff also gives the intestines a thorough scrubbing on the way through.

I’m not certain, though, that Frosted Bran can satiate me without assistance.

Kellogg’s doesn’t lavish as much sugar on its new cereal — 9 grams of added sugar per serving — as it does on Frosted Flakes — 12 grams.

Frosted Bran’s added sugar equals that of another Kellogg’s favorite, Raisin Bran. I don’t drizzle sugar on Raisin Bran, but that’s mainly because the raisins — which capture sugar crystals nicely in their wrinkles — are quite sweet.

Frosted Bran lacks the raisin advantage.

I doubt in any case that I will use as much sugar on these newly frosted bran flakes as I do on even more bland cereals such as the Chex cousins — wheat, corn and rice.

I dearly love all the Chex varieties. The pattern of tiny gaps on each square allows for ideal milk permeation. The saturated surface absorbs some of the sugar, creating an intensely sweet glaze. And although the top layer — and hence the first several spoonfuls — are especially enticing, the sugar migrates, like nutrients leaching through soil to nourish plants’ roots.

I prefer to let Chex, and most other cereals, marinate in milk. This yields a slightly mushy texture and is a technique that makes my wife, Lisa, shudder with feigned nausea.

(Slightly feigned; the sight of my bowl on the counter, the cereal slowly congealing, seems to truly disgust her.)

Now that frosting has reached at least one bran variety, though, I suppose Chex will eventually succumb, too.

There are already Chex cereals — Honey Nut, for instance — that are sweet enough, straight from the box, that even I don’t feel it necessary to augment the flavor.

But I hope the cereal makers never go all in on frosting.

I still get a small thrill from making passes over my bowl with the sugar decanter, a motion rather like a sorcerer sweeping a wand across a top hat.

A questionable analogy, perhaps.

But the result is certainly magical.