I used to like having cereals for the breakfast, but now, everytime I plan to buy some in the supermarket, I'm cooled down because of how unhealthy they are.
In France, there is something called the "nutriscore". It is a score between A and F that has to be prominently displayed on the packaging of products. It indicates how this product compares with others in the same kind of category on a healthy related scale.
Industrial breakfast cereals are very bad. Easily D or E.
As someone from the us, I’m deeply skeptical of government nutritional labeling / recommendation since the travesty of the food pyramid when I was young.
Cereals were basically the best thing to eat because how else where you going to fill the foundation of the pyramid with your 11 (exact number is fuzzy) recommended servings of grains per day. The pyramid was shown proudly on all the boxes.
Meanwhile protein and fats were to be minimized.
It may not be causal, but it certainly didn’t help the obesity problem in this country that the government explicitly recommended everyone fill up in foods that aren’t actually filling.
It’s not the government’s fault when they said cereal, they meant healthy oats and grains but instead people bought fruity pebbles. I remember being a kid in the 80s and it was very much understood that the healthy cereal was the plain cheerios and unsweetened corn flakes and stuff that nobody (especially kids) wanted to eat-or we’d just add a ton of sugar to it at home.
If you want to blame government for lack of regulation in terms of proliferation of unhealthy food over the years, ok that I get. When they issue guidelines (pyramid) and people just completely misinterpret/ignore it, that’s people shooting their feet.
The food pyramid was nonsense, regardless of interpretation. No one needs to eat that much grain - and did you forget that it explicitly listed dairy as a nutritional requirement?
I’m not arguing for the pyramid by any means or saying that it wasn’t flawed.
My critique is that instead of poking wholes in it, debating if eggs are or are not healthy and such, we really just normalized massive portions and fried/fast food/soft drinks/sugar in everything/etc. Which completely misses the spirit of what the pyramid was even aspiring to be. We didn’t even consider the pyramid when we made our food choices. We just allowed our gluttony to lead us where it may. That’s nobody’s fault but our own. We knew very well we were making poor choices along the way, but gave in to our desires. (Using “we” as collective US generalization, not trying to speak about anyone specifically, I’m sure someone here has a counterpoint but the obesity stats represent us collectively )
I don’t disagree but I do wonder how much the food pyramid played into developing those habits. Think of all the schools and parents trying to follow it and conditioning their children into eating all that grain and dairy every day. I don’t think it’s solely responsible but I don’t think its effects were negligible.
Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad, and they get what they expect. In Europe we get very angry when the government is corrupt and bad.
Maybe instead of trying to spread your meme of "government always bad", you try to take on the European meme of "government needs to be good or everything goes to hell"?
America’s government - as in, the civil service - is neither corrupt nor bad. It is a very well-run country! You need only visit America to witness how excellent it is in many ways. There is a reason that, despite its faults, America is still the most innovative and economically powerful country in the world.
In terms of Europe, the level of corruption and competence seems to be highly variable depending on the country. So again it seems misplaced to make a broad assertion like the one you made.
IMHO the US government is extremely corrupt. Many important regulatory agencies are captured by industry and run with a revolving door of conflict of interest. Corporate donors have basically completely captured Congress. We have a melding of industry and government, seen most visibly through our foreign policy, that makes us a quasi-fascist authoritarian country.
It's well-run in some aspects and disastrous in others. The fact that the US is an economic powerhouse is due to other things, not the quality of its federal and local government.
Tons of natural resources and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity, these immigrants serving as the bedrock that instilled the current US culture.
Before anyone tries anything funny I'm neither American, nor Western European, nor Protestant.
I’m sure this is a nice founding narrative that brings comfort to a lot of Americans of Western European ancestry. I think USA is better off inventing a more inclusive one in the coming century though (I suppose they already have in parts)
The doors were never open to Chinese immigrants except for limited periods.
Mass Chinese migration to the US only really began after the Civil War, and was quickly locked down with the Chinese Exclusion Act [0] only a few decades after the doors were "opened". Even then, naturalization of Chinese citizens as US citizens was still restricted. There even had to be a Supreme Court case to establish that the children of Chinese immigrants born in the US were US citizens! [1]
The Chinese Exclusion Act was only repealed in 1943, when a small number (literally hundreds, almost nothing) of Chinese migrants were allowed in, with that increasing slowly over time.
Even today, Chinese and Indian (and others, but the impact is greatest for high population countries) migration is limited by the H1B cap and multi-decade green card queues. If the queue to get a green card is so long that you'll die first [2], you have effectively been banned from permanent residency and naturalization.
My point is simple: doors were open to European migrants, so European migrants built the US and formed its national character. Other methods and types of migration may have also worked to build the US, but we'll never know because the US restricted them heavily and still does.
Chinese laborers, for example, built the western part of the transcontinental railroad. A pretty substantial contribution.
And FDR interned 110,000 Japanese Americans in WW2. My dad who lived in Long Beach at the time said much of this was motivated by envy, as the Japanese Americans ran prosperous farms and businesses.
Practically irrelevant. Brazil and Peru opened their doors to Asian immigrants but just like in the US, they were second wave immigrants and they couldn't save either of those countries.
You need the initial immigrants to do the heavy lifting, plus they majorly control politics.
Consider the descriptive part about the immigrants to be an example of the following cultural archetype: "ambitious, motivated, solid work ethic, respect for education and legitimate entreprise".
Any other settlers of the same kind would have succeeded. As a counterexample Spanish and Portuguese settlers largely failed to establish similar societies.
A fundamental issue is overlooked here. The US was established as a free market country. People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy. The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.
Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.
> A fundamental issue is overlooked here. The US was established as a free market country.
The playbook for a succesful free market economy is to use protectionism at home and (if applicable: if the state can be called imperialistic) impose free market principles on subject nations so that domestic corporations can exploit them.
Look at South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.
> People of all backgrounds thrive in a free market economy.
Look at the Gini coefficient of the US.
> The proof of that is many countries have switched to free markets, and promptly started thriving.
Not Russia.
> Countries with unfree economies, like South American ones, do poorly. Chile seems to go back and forth between free markets and socialism, with the consequential ups and downs of its economy.
Chile had a coup in 1973 which removed the social democratic leader from power and installed a neoliberal government. Neoliberalism is the modern free market incarnation. Why didn't they thrive?
> The playbook for a succesful free market economy is to use protectionism at home
Nope. Protectionism hurts the economy because it is an impediment to free trade.
> South Korea for an example of a country that was built with protectionist capitalism.
Protectionism hurts the economy, but not enough to sink it. Free markets are remarkably resilient to damage.
> Not Russia.
Russia's economy is a kleptocracy.
> Chile
Installing a neoliberal government doesn't mean they actually instituted a free market. Chile has, as I said, gone back and forth between free markets and socialism. The country would get on its feet with the free markets, then switch back to socialism until it was on its knees again.
To be fair (although I don't agree with him in the slightest): he did say “free market” to begin with, which in the common vernacular is contrasted with more state intervention.
C'mon, be serious and name an actual "total communism" entity, please.
I have no love for nominally Communist States - they're authoritarian centralised party states a gnats arse or less from full dictatorships perpetrating the lie that they're on the path toward some socialist | communist goal - but they are all far away removed from such things.
> and a huge pool of primarily Western European Protestant immigrants in the 1600, 1700s, 1800s, with a strong culture for independence and a continuous search for prosperity,
That's a long-winded way to say Settler Colonialism.
The key "crossing of the rubicon" that America has not yet reached is the normalization of everyday corruption (bribes, local corruption as a rule, etc).
We have done that in the federal political sphere for quite a while. The last vestiges of actually doing political right for the moral principle was probably back in the 80s or 90s.
There is a lot of corruption in the backwaters, and again at the high levels of large city government, but in general in the civil service there isn't corruption.
Likewise the military is still relatively uncorrupt in its administration, outside of the outlandish contracts of the military industrial complex.
It's probably because functionally speaking the "elite" capture most of the corruption money at the highest levels, and won't tolerate the inefficiency of low level corruption.
As a European, that's a very superficial reddit-tier understanding. Europe is far far from the civic paradise of engaged citizens you're trying to portray. Not even to mention the EU government, which hugely affects everybody's life but which the overwhelming majority of citizens never interact with.
Intelligent students of history expect the government to be corrupt and bad.
It works the same in every country, from Japan to Russia to Germany to the USA to Venezuela.
It's the principal-agent problem, writ large.
I live in both the US and Germany (roughly 50/50) and the level of corruption is about the same in both places.
A lot of it is so ingrained in the culture you don't register it anymore. It gets automatically filed under "the way things work here" and becomes relatively invisible.
That's a weird thing to say. First "large" seems like a weasel word. Second, there are HUGE differences in corruption between say Russia and the US. While we complain about the US, the level of corruption is orders of magnitude lower than Russia.
Orders of magnitude differences in corruption matters a lot.
I find so many people in m part of the US that are like completely oblivious to what goes on around the world. Its like Plato’s cave, they only know how bad things can get based on a limited view of the world.
Any large groups of people tend toward corruption.
That being said, in general corruption in western countries is massively lower then elsewhere. They actually function well with low levels of corruption in general.
The corruption in western nations is more sophisticated, and is better at hiding in plain sight. The type in the east is more furtive, probably out of an effort to "save face".
They differ in style, but not degree.
Over here we call it special euphemisms like "lobbying" and "regulatory capture" instead of "bribery" and "kickbacks". It makes people regard it differently, giving it an air of respectability.
Given the size of the corruption industry in the US, this was inevitable, as it would need a surface level of legitimacy to be able to attract and employ the sheer numbers of people who operate the machinery of the flows of bribery money from industry to servile lawmakers.
Why do you think there are so few major retailers in the US? Media companies? ISPs? Insurance companies? Hospitals? Health care networks? Pharmacies? Pharmaceutical companies? Grocery stores? Food manufacturers? Banks?
It's not lack of supply or lack of demand. Many people wish to manufacture cheap insulin or build better ISPs or more cheap surgery clinics or better grocery stores.
Soon it will be the same with social networks. They already achieved it with app stores, which is the only meaningful publishing today, apps having killed the web.
Anything that has broad social appeal or need which subsequently results in large recurring cash flows will get regulated upon so that the cash doesn't flow to anyone the existing power structure doesn't want to enrich. (I have a separate theory that the current anti-Musk backlash is engineered because of an accidental failure of the system implementing this longstanding policy, due to the double whammy of unexpected breakout success of both Tesla stock and SpaceX operational scaling simultaneously. He sure is lucky he has a US passport whilst trying to do what he's doing.)
People like to ascribe this to "late stage capitalism" but for every dysfunctional industry lacking real competition or consumer choice, I can point to a bad set of laws or regulations paid for by that industry. It's a failure of the state to do its job to protect end users and opportunity and liberty.
When copyright was about to expire, Disney went to the legislature with checkbook in hand. Laws are for sale in the USA.
Why does the illusion of consumer choice become more and more farcical every year?
The US regulatory machine is totally corrupt in almost everything it touches. We just reclassified it so it seems less shady than it is, but the story of Comcast and the FCC stands clear as just one of many illustrations.
(Or Bell in Canada, or DTAG in Germany. It works the same everywhere.)
> Why do you think there are so few major retailers in the US? Media companies? ISPs? Insurance companies? Hospitals? Health care networks? Pharmacies? Pharmaceutical companies? Grocery stores? Food manufacturers? Major entertainment media franchises? Entertainment venues?
Because free markets don't actually stop the accumulation of private market power. The natural state of most markets is monopoly or oligopoly due to efficiencies of scale and collusion. Governments at least provide some degree of legal oversight to this private power.
None of the industries I listed are operating in a free market, so I am not sure why you brought that concept up as a scapegoat.
All of the large incumbents in those industries in western countries are protected by laws paid for, engineered, and often literally written by those industries. Places where this is not the case are the exception, not the rule.
This is a conjecture held as axiomatic by some economists and not by others. There's no strong evidence for it and there's been a lack of opportunities to observe natural experiments (we have not seen advanced economies exist outside the scope of interventionist states). But there's plenty of examples of private economic power tending toward concentration (cartels, etc.) when permitted.
The government in Serbia never struck me as especially uncorrupted, but I also don't think this has caused everything there to go to hell. Laws exist and are largely enforced, it just happens you can bribe your way out of most fines.
I met friends there looking for any possible way to come to Canada or the US largely to escape the systematic corruption which exists in some Balkan countries.
Americans expect the government to be corrupt and bad because history shows that government to be corrupt and bad.
We don't get it because we expect it. We get it because history repeats.
Which is why we setup ours to be limited in power and why, as time goes on and that power expands, it gets worse and worse and why stuff like POTUS elections are now life and death when they used to be largely figure heads.
I wouldn't say American government is especially corrupt. What it is is bureaucratic, inefficient, and counterproductive, because it implements policies that have counterproductive side effects.
Did you actually base what you ate on the food pyramid?
I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.
I grew up in the same period, they showed us the pyramid in school and I literally never gave it a second thought.
> I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.
Actually, to a shocking degree, yes.
I grew up in an immigrant family, so my parents were far too busy working to do non-mainstream research on diet. I grew up eating 2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time.
If your parents aren't well-off enough to do dedicated research into the optimal diet for their children (which describes most of American parents), then you'll follow the advertised government guidelines.
>2+ bowls of white rice, another serving of vegetables, and a small serving of meat for most meals. This was me "trying to be healthy" given the mainstream knowledge at the time
I mean, except for the white rice (which should always be whole, like all grains in your diet) this seems like a good diet. Of course it all depends on how much stuff you were given to eat, but there is nothing wrong with this
Everything is relative. But imo it’s VERY unlikely to matter “a lot”. Everything is trickier if you’re trying to lose weight, but white rice vs brown is a tiny offender relative to the more common culprits
You should not be eating the same whole grain (or any food for that matter) all of the time exactly because each food has its pros and cons (the cons are vastly outnumbered by the pros if you eat the good foods though)
Every dietitian tells you to vary your diet as much as possible. Your reply is moot because you are blindly considering 1 argument at a time while the guidelines paint a whole picture
That is a dramatically healthier meal than very many American kids typically eat. Compare it to, say: a hotdog, a bag of potato chips, and a 20oz bottle of soda.
Agreed, the thing is my kids can afford the calories that I’ve been avoiding for a very long time. Starch has energy, habits about balance are important too.
Buying decisions from parents was influenced. Advertising influenced people. School lunches. What parents would feed other kids after activities. Habits of people "never giving it a second thought" were still being shaped by these forces. Even if someone only thinks about it a fraction of the time, it moves the needle. If my mom ate 10% more processed carbs than her parents and passed those habits to me, I was impacted. Rinse Repeat for 60 years.
We did because the schools followed the food pyramid. So they pushed foods on us that were low fat and high carb (like the ‘healthy’ chocolate skim milk, and no whole milk). Margarine instead of butter. Government food recommendations are HUGE deal to kids in public schools in the United States.
Margarine and butter both sort under "fat" in old dietary guidelines. The reason schools (or anyone) preferred the former was because of cost.
I bet government food recommendations was just the starting point, and concerns about cost and getting kids to actually eat it would have transformed any plan into something similar. Calories processed into pure forms (sugar and fat) are cheap. Grains are super cheap, which was a big part of why they were the backbone of dietary recommendations for so long - no use instructing people to eat something they can't afford.
I can't imagine eating high carb and margarine is a problem for children. They burn anything they swallow especially if you stick to decent carbs like bread or rice.
It derails where parents serve yoghurt drinks to babies (have seen that) or when they get accustomed to open the fridge for a drink (seen that also).
Ah, that is a good point. I was a poor sack lunch kid so I never considered that aspect.
Have they improved at all? Minnesota passed free school lunch for all, and my daughter will be starting school in a few years. Packing her a healthy lunch literally becomes the more expensive option.
It's so weird to me that free school lunches for children are something that is not 100% immediately obvious and uncontroversial and beyond any discussion.
Even in the UK in the 1980s, at the height of ghoulish neoliberal Thatcherism, there was a major controversy when she tried to stop giving free milk to kids in school (milk-snatcher they called her).
It very much depends on where you live. Many Republicans were livid about Michelle Obama’s healthy school lunch effort and that inspired unnecessary rancor over what shouldn’t be controversial.
The other problem is that if kids aren’t used to eating vegetables at home they might not eat them at school, and the schools don’t want to deal with increased waste / throwing.
I really doubt if people actually ate the food guide pyramid they would be overweight. The problem is they still lace everything with that top part of fats, oils, and sweets. Cheetos are not the base of the pyramid. I don’t know anyone that is obese from eating whole grain breads, rice, and pasta. It’s not calorie dense until you start adding all the extras.
> I have heard this levied against the government before as having caused the obesity epidemic, but I really can’t imagine someone who sitting around deciding “I have to eat more bread, the government’s pyramid drawing demands it” rather than just eating what they want to eat.
And even if a huge number of Americans did robotically follow it that would not explain the obesity epidemic, because the obesity epidemic is worldwide.
But many countries that had a similar food pyramid are relatively thin, and some countries that are very obese never had one, so you're right that it's a poor explanation
If that were true, and the food pyramid was this disaster, you'd expect the kids of the well-educated middle class to be fatter and the kids of parentally neglected kids to be thinner.
If it's not like that, probably other factors were a lot more important than the food pyramid.
For as much criticism as the food pyramid gets these days, you’d think today’s diet recommendations would be dramatically different. But they’re not. The food pyramid is still very close to the diets most dieticians in most developed countries recommend. There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it.
Most breakfast cereals have tons of sugars added. The top part of the food pyramid—the smallest area—is for foods with added sugars. The food pyramid never justified eating a few bowls of Cap’n Crunch for breakfast, though that seems to basically be what people accuse it of.
The bottom layer was literally called the "Bread, Cereal, Rice, & Pasta Group" and featured a picture of a bowl of processed breakfast cereal, among other things.
The top layer was "Fats, Oils, & Sweets" and had some white and yellow spots.
Maybe it wasn't supposed to be justifying that, but as an infographic that's what it was suggesting.
Telling people they should be having a lot of cereal and showing them a bowl of cereal (along with saltine crackers) is going to lead them to believe that's healthy. Especially in the 90's when "cereal" for almost everyone meant highly processed breakfast cereals with a lot of added sugars, and there was little awareness with how much sugar was being added to everything.
Telling people to eat a lot of whole grains is entirely different from telling people to eat a lot of, quote: "bread, cereal, rice and pasta."
> There’s a weird conspiratorial mindset people get around diets for some reason. I don’t get it.
I think it's because
1. Diet fads can be extremely lucrative
2. Stuff you put into your body touches on topics of purity and cleanliness, which have always been a big deal to us. Many religions have strong opinions on it, but it probably predates them.
3. Large interest groups do in fact organize to push their products as healthy, or at least less unhealthy. So there is some "conspiracy", both for and against carbs (and protein, and whatever).
The pyramid and the new myplate are created by the USDA. I’m not sure why the department of agriculture is providing nutrition information. So I do share in your skepticism. I think this should be CDC/NIH owned.
Honestly, anything is better than the complete lack of useful labelling we're stuck with in the US. I agree the approach of some counties is heavy-handed and too opinionated, but I'd rather that than the corporate-approved nonsense we print on our food.
This is because in France, in the past 20 years, we completely lost the simple "Müsli". In Germany, we still have them and this is in our family our base breakfast from Monday to Friday. But effectively, in France, I cannot find Müsli without added sugar.
I buy Bob's Red Mill "Old Country Style Muesli" in the US. It is the only one I've found with zero added sugars. Most grocery stores in my area seem to carry it tucked away somewhere.
Your recipe looks nice, but some dried fruit has a bunch of added sugars, so that's something to keep an eye on though.
Yeah, my local Walmart has Bob's Red Mill Muesli. My local mainstream supermarket has store brand muesli along with other brands including Bob's. It's just not a rare thing at all, don't know what that poster was talking about.
Was just going to chime in about the same excellent product. The I add in sweet Yoplait yogurt (which I like to call “fruit pudding”). Gotta get that sugar in somehow! :)
It exists and you can probably find it. I buy it weekly.
"Bob's Red Mill" is a high end mill that also has a Muesli product in the US that is very good. Wholefoods carries them but your local chain may too (eg HEB does).
You may also have a store brand!
It'll be with the actual cereals like oats, not the sugary boxed stuff usually.
I do the same in Spain, although stores usually have some without added sugar.
I buy the grains and cook them in an air fryer. Takes about 5 minutes prep and 20 for cooking, then expand them in a tray for cooling. I don’t use dried fruits though
It’s a Swiss dish consisting of soaked rolled oats. Raw oatmeal if you will. People usually add fruits to it, and or nuts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muesli
I was going to chime in and say I’ve never heard of this either, but after checking the Wikipedia link I know exactly what this is. Where I am in northwest Iowa, everyone just calls this “overnight oats/oatmeal”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word Muesli before.
Ah okay, I just looked at the picture and read the brief description of cold oats left overnight and assumed they’re the same thing. If that’s not the case then I’ve definitely never heard of muesli before today.
You have to be a bit careful when picking a brand. All of the stores mentioned here (Walmart, Trader Joes and Whole Foods) carry museli that is loaded with sugar, which it shouldn’t contain.
They generally also carry have options that aren’t just crunchy candy, but be prepared to read a lot of nutrition labels before you find one.
Yeah, you should be careful when picking a brand, but I don't see muesli with loaded sugar at those places. Are you looking at granola? First off, I haven't seen them in my local stores (outside of Bob's Red Mill[1]). Walmart's website also mentions Familia Swiss Muesli Cereal, says "No added sugar" on the front and the nutritional values don't look far off. Trader Joe's also looks comperatble to Bob's Red Mill[2]
Grains, nuts and dried fruit all contain sugar so muesli will contain some sugar. The key is to not buy muesli with added sugar. Walmart and most of the grocery stores around me sell Bob's Red Mill muesli which doesn't have any added sugar. The grocery store I normally use also sells Alpen brand. I bought some Alpen No Sugar Added muesli there a couple of days ago because it was on sale.
There are multiple brands of Muesli in many large grocery stores everywhere I've tried to buy some. Most don't have any added sugar. This is the first I've heard of it being difficult to find.
Fruit with its fiber is still superior to fruit juice or syrups lacking fiber. Fermenting the fructose in the gut is essential with fiber is essential to neutralizing the fructose.
I buy simple müesli without added sugar in the cheapest Swiss grocery store. Mix it with some yogourt and fruit. Mostly yogourt and the fruit distracts my mind from the cardboard taste. In fact, I don't pretend that the grains are healthy: they are in my yogourt because they are very useful for regularity. I shit like a triceratops afterwards.
In the Netherlands basic müsli is still popular after many decades. I swapped it for just a handful of nuts with three spoons greek (10% fat) yoghurt plus a double espresso. Super fast and lets me skip lunch. If I add carbs, like with müsli, it would be more difficult to skip lunch.
Carbohydrate intake has many factors including 'speed of processing' which is retarded by the presence of fiber and fat. So while a serving of muesli might 30g of carbohydrates it also will have 5g of fat and fiber and protein, which affects how fast your insulin levels rise and how high the spike.
There is nothing wrong with carbohydrates, it's over consuming them that's the problem. Müsli without added sugar can easily be a part of a well balanced diet. It's basically just a different form of oatmeal.
Carbohydrates are just sugar your body has to work a little bit to unlock first, but they’re just sugar. They’re really not much better for you than raw sugar, they’re just slow dose. They’ll spike your insulin a little less, but ask a diabetic, the overall difference isn’t a ton.
Fiber is a carbohydrate the body can’t digest so you can generally subtract them when figuring, but beyond that carbohydrates alone are just sugar as far as your body is concerned.
As is everything in biochemistry, the absorption rate sets the response. 5g of sugar that can only be digested over the course of hours is much different than 5g of sugar that can be digested in minutes.
But the fiber content makes you feel sated sooner, so you are likely to eat less of it than sugar.
And musli isn't processed as much as other breakfast cereals. We don't know what causes it yet, but there's a clear correlation between eating highly processed foods and obesity.
If muesli were simply a slightly better carb, that would make fruit the same. The fiber and more complex sugars are what make you feel fuller and glucose levels less volatile.
There are loads of total garbage sugary breakfast cereals available that are B. I mean literally stuff with 24% sugar. The label is completely worthless, ignore it, just read the ingredients list and the dietary information.
If you read the question and answer, “completely useless “ is just silly. There are some cases where it fails. The people behind the score acknowledges that it’s not good for sugary cereals and say they will work to amend it
What do you think of those Kelloggs All-Bran Buds (think they're psyllium)? I do kinda wish they didn't add any sugar but with all the fibre and micronutrients, I feel like its pretty wholesome still...
All the more reason to avoid anything below B then no? Or do you have a counter example of something rated below a B that you would recommend over the B rating?
Nutriscore is terrible. They keep on diabolising saturated fat despite tye lack of evidence, and they give a pass to sugar and omega-6 despite the mounting evidence that they are the cause of the obesity crisis.
For instance, they label Roquefort with an F because it's fatty and salty, but nobody's gotten fat eating that, you can't just go binging pounds of it, it's just not that kind of food.
This is really interesting because I can see intense pushback against suggesting the government do this in the US (unless "nutriscore" is a private 3rd party score, not the gov?)
I think no one would _really_ object to labelling like oatmeal healthier than chips. The issue would be along the thresholds, when a product gets a B and its competitor gets an A. I can see wanting to dispute that decision, or claims of corruption to skew the ratings in favor of certain companies etc.
I think that's a common myth. There's no separate category for frozen pizza in Nutriscore. The categories are: general food, drinks, cheeses, and oils/fats.
Pizza producers can game the system somewhat, however, by adding ingredients that are counted positive (like protein or fiber) to partially offset "negative" ingredients such as sugar or saturated fats.
Dairy lobbying has led to cheese as a separate category and that milk is counted as food, rather than drink.
> I think no one would _really_ object to labelling like oatmeal healthier than chips.
Chip manufacturers certainly would (and do). They pay money to politicians to keep these regulations away, and they pay money to media to stir up a counter-movement against these ideas.
> unless "nutriscore" is a private 3rd party score, not the gov?
From Wikipedia:
> The system relies on the computation of a nutrient profiling system derived from the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency nutrient profiling system (FSA score). It was created by Santé Publique France, the French public health agency, based on the work of Serge Hercberg from Sorbonne Paris North University. Other bodies involved in the development of the system included the Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES) and the High Council for Public Health (HCSP).
Thresholds are not a problem as long as they are documented. Presumably the standard I'd neutral, and if less (say) sugar makes the product rating change, I don't see how that hurts competition. Meet the threshold, don't meet the threshold, it's up to you.
Your thesis that providing nutritional information to the public would result in industry pushback would suggest that govt cares more about corporate profits than public health.
Alas I agree with you. One feels that providing nutritional information to American consumers would be easily trumped by money.
I'm not sure such an "obvious" conclusion is necessarily a good sign of effective government.
Whole Foods sort of does this. They have a minimum bar (which they hopefully raise over time) and simply don’t carry anything that fails to meet it.
(If you are going to label something an F, why sell it?)
They also still seem to try to get bad practices banned.
For instance, I recently saw a sign explaining all the different types of fruit “wax” in their produce section.
Apparently it is legal and common practice to coat fruit with melted plastic in the US now, they aren’t able to source plastic-free fruit, and the only effective way to remove it is to throw away the peel.
I’m hoping a direct competitor to them with higher standards pops up, triggering an arms race.
> unless "nutriscore" is a private 3rd party score
The advantage of 3rd party evaluation is that when you don't like the score they gave you, you can easily create your own "independent" evaluation company that will rate all your products A+. At the end of the day, every product of every major company will be A+, each rated by a different evaluator.
> The food contains less than 0.5 g of sugars, as defined in § 101.9(c)(6)(ii), per reference amount customarily consumed and per labeled serving or, in the case of a meal product or main dish product, less than 0.5 g of sugars per labeled serving; and
>(ii) The food contains no ingredient that is a sugar or that is generally understood by consumers to contain sugars unless the listing of the ingredient in the ingredient statement is followed by an asterisk that refers to the statement below the list of ingredients, which states "adds a trivial amount of sugar," "adds a negligible amount of sugar," or "adds a dietarily insignificant amount of sugar;" and
First, you can't add sugar, it has to be sugars that naturally occur in the other ingredients, but not ingredients that people know contain sugar like fruit, and second products don't have as much leeway as you think in defining their serving size. The FDA actually spells out what kinds of food get what serving size which is why you never see 1 chip / serving.
Fruit juice is not much better than soda when it comes sugar content. The only beverages allowed in our house are water, whole fat milk, and alcohol (because of course us parents get an exception).
Whole-fat milk is a meal, not a beverage, and it's a mystery how anyone can put up with the flavour. Especially mystifying: whole-fat milk with your meal.
I have to limit how much my toddler gets, or he would literally suck down 1.5 liters of whole milk a day, and not bother with that time-wasting eating business that keeps him away from more important things, like his train set.
Only my kids love whole fat milk (it's kinda scary how much of it they drink, but then being vegetarian it does provide a decent amount of protein and fat). I just use it for coffee.
You can find cereals with a Nutriscore of A. There aren't many, they are usually the ones without added sugar or chocolate, and they tend to cost more unfortunately.
Recently got some Carrefour bio (organic) cereals, some mixed with various seeds and another one mix of cereals, both with A Nutriscore and no processing or added sugar.
As with all cereals, the energy value is always around 350-400kCal/100g, but they contain very low actual sugar (15% for one, still quite high probably because of the dried fruits -I'll need to chose better next time- and 1% for the other).
Typical breakfast cereals will be between 25% to 50%+ sugar content (wtf...).
Takes a few minutes to heat raw oats with milk to make porridge. Add some fruit and you've ticked a lot of the boxes for a proportion of a day's required nutrients as indicated by USDA and similar authorities elsewhere. I've hardly touched a commercial cereal for years and have no regrets.
Exactly. You can't have a nutrition rating system for humans and not rate the skeletal muscle of cattle above pretty much everything else. Doesn't matter what one thinks about the meat industry, carbon production, and so forth; from a nutrition standpoint, beef has all the nutrition a human needs, humans are well adapted to consuming it, and hypotheses around cancer and heart disease never panned out.
And wow, what a bunch of poppycock that nutriscore that system is. I'd heard of it but never looked into it. It considers "high" saturated fat, or "high" salt, or "high" energy density as negatives.
Fat content too intense for my taste. You claim the debate on saturated fat is settled but that's not what pretty much every major health organization says. Big keto fan huh?
If the scale is A-F, that would put ground beef at about average which seems about right. Its a great source of protein and a good source of some vitamins and minerals, but is high in saturated fat and has a low amount of other vitamins and minerals.
Nutriscore is notoriously flawed. You are better off looking at the actual nutrition information and minimising the amount of saturated fat and sugar you eat.
I don't think. Probably some times they are a little bit dramatic. But you are still free to make your own opinion.
At least for one category of products, they use the same elements for comparison.
Breakfast cereal is generally pure garbage, so I'm happy enough about this score, but a globally applied linear "goodness" scale on foods is too simple to be accurate. Food is good for you, or not, in context of the rest of your diet and, maybe to a lesser extent, your lifestyle/values/goals.
This isn't telling you what to eat, but it is giving you a tool that you can use to decide if you want to eat it. You know, while you take into consideration your own overall diet and personal taste. It makes make doing this stuff easier, at least to some folks.
You don't have to use a tool available to you if you don't like it.
My friends back in France are all using apps (I think apps like yuka) to check these scores. It’s interesting because I feel like there’s a similar wave in the US (with the recent netflix Poisoned show)
On the other hand, bread + jam or croissants, which is typically what French are eating for breakfast, is not necessarily better. As bought from Bakeries, those don't have a nutri-score either.
Recently found organic beef has a nutri-score of B, but the same meat, pressed as a patty with salt and pepper gets a nutri-score of D, I wouldn't give too much about the score now xD
Wouldn't the patty also be ground up with all the fat, while the raw unprocessed beef could have visible fat trimmed and not consumed? Maybe that accounts for the difference.
If it encourages the industry to reduce the amount of salt and sugar they add, I consider it as a good thing.
The Nutriscore is a partial indicator, e.g. it doesn't mention how processed something is. But I find it a valuable tool to quickly discard many options from the supermarket.
I always assumed this was mostly down to truth-in-advertising rules; I remember when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s breakfast cereal ads making all sorts of extravagant, and untrue, health claims which would not be tolerated today. This is referenced in the article; where permitted, making misleading health claims is still an industry mainstay.
Arguably, without advertising which makes you believe, incorrectly, that it is good for you, breakfast cereal _makes no sense_; it’s not surprising that late millennials and Gen Z, who were largely not exposed to this advertising, have foresaken it.
For an interesting small-scale model see Ribena in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ribena); allegedly healthy high-sugar drink, used to be _everywhere_, until they stopped being able to use misleading ads to sell it.
I mean as long as you avoid the ones that have a lot of sugar added, eating cereal for breakfast isn't much different from eating pasta for dinner. It's a couple hundred calories worth of carbs which is not so bad in itself.
Where people get into trouble is their overall calorie intake and the breakdown of their macros, it's not uncommon for people to get too many calories from fats or carbs. If you're sedentary you don't really need a lot of calories period. But if you're keeping an eye on all those things a bowl of oatmeal in the morning isn't going to kill you.
Edit: Here's a list of cereals and their nutritional info: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga... Note that at the recommended serving size, obviously some are more healthy than others, but frankly none of them are really going to kill you. A serving of cereal is only about 100-250 calories. The problem arises when you eat multiple servings in one sitting.
What a weird article, I kept scrolling down looking for the ... breakfast cereal? The only thing they have on there that is what people are actually talking about is frosted flakes. They don't even have plain Cheerios on this list... Am I missing something?
It's a UK website. Cheerios are relatively new here, and my impression is that they aren't very popular. In particular, i suspect they haven't caught on with the demographic of people who write articles for the BHF website.
I'm not sure "relatively new" is accurate, though of course it depends on the timescale. They seemed as widespread as other common sugary cereals (Coco Pops, Frosties, Ricicles et al) during the 90s. However, if we're looking back further, it could well be the case that they were comparatively late arrivals.
Frosted Flakes is representative of the general category that you are calling "breakfast cereal." The items on the list are the different kinds of cereal categories.
I don't think so... The article seemed to be specifically talking about "corn flakes with frosting", which is not comparable to, like, whatever cocoa puffs is.
I mean, the category is labeled "Sugar-frosted cornflakes" in the article. I see that it compares them to "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals", but it's clearly still talking specifically about sugar-frosted cornflakes in that section. It also puts this higher in the list than granola with dried fruit, and I promise you that granola is healther than the large majority of mainstream mass-market sweetened cereals in the US. (I do get that it's a UK article, and perhaps "suger-frosted cornflakes" and "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals" are the primary sweetened cereals there, but that's not how it is in the US.)
I dunno, I really don't want to be pedantic, I just think you're saying "you shouldn't read what the words in the article say, you should read the words I say it means to say", and that's not how I read...
> I mean, the category is labeled "Sugar-frosted cornflakes" in the article. It also puts this higher in the list than granola with dried fruit, and I promise you that granola is healther than the large majority of mainstream mass-market sweetened cereals in the US. (I do get that it's a UK article, and perhaps "suger-frosted cornflakes" and "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals" are the primary sweetened cereals there, but that's not how it is in the US.)
Yes, these are the primary sweetened cereals in the UK, but I don't think they're any healthier than the US versions. Frosties seem to be nutritionally equivalent to Lucky Charms just without the off-putting artificial colours.
I think it's simply that the granola is very dense, they list a bowl as 60g vs 30g for the sweetened cereal. I tend to just sprinkle a bit on top of a bowl of yoghurt and fresh fruit.
There are far worse cereals than what we call frosted flakes, is what I found confusing. It is one of the healthier ones! A lot of the cereal in a US cereal aisle is essentially candy. I guess I wouldn't have been confused if the article had a section at a bottom for "all the rest of the super sweet cereals".
> Edit: Here's a list of cereals and their nutritional info: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga... Note that at the recommended serving size, obviously some are more healthy than others, but frankly none of them are really going to kill you. A serving of cereal is only about 100-250 calories. The problem arises when you eat multiple servings in one sitting.
As in... eating normal sized breakfast ? Ain't nobody bothering to get the milk out of the fridge for 250 calories breakfast.
2 eggs, 1 serving of cereal with milk, some fruit, black coffee. Boom, a balanced breakfast that includes cereal. You're welcome.
Now obviously telling someone to eat sugary cereal isn't good health advice. But even if you opted for one of the less healthy cereals in my link - frosted cornflakes - one serving only has 11g sugar, 13% of your daily allowance. Not really going to kill you.
Sit down and eat three servings of frosted flakes in one go and yeah you'll slowly kill yourself.
There are so many weird takes in this discussion. Obviously what you have said here is untrue, maybe it is your preference but of course it is not universal. Many people make eggs for breakfast and eat them with a single serving of cereal. I'm one of them.
There's very little difficulty in making eggs, two of them in a frying pan, wait, flip, done...
The other weird take was the people who kept saying "cereal" only refers to cereals that are high in sugar. The statement makes zero sense on its face, cereals with sugar are grammatically a subset of cereals...
Cereal in fact refers to a type of grass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereal But the topic here (literally in the headline) is breakfast cereals, some of those have added sugar, some of which don't.
> I mean as long as you avoid the ones that have a lot of sugar added,
This is virtually all of them, though. I think it’s generally not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still refined sugar for breakfast and really not ideal.
In the list of ten breakfast cereals I posted, four of the first five have essentially zero sugar.
Consumer habits notwithstanding there are many low/no sugar breakfast cereals available at any supermarket, they are usually not the ones targeting kids with cartoon characters and zany names on the box.
Cereals are great - I eat rolled oats with milk or yoghurt and it takes ages to digest so i don't have to eat anything until lunch. Keloggs sweetened nonsense (seriously 40% sugar?) of course doesn't make sense
As a parent, I think it makes perfect sense. Most kids like grains (the lunch and dinner version of cereal is pasta) and it's very easy to get cereal onto the table while you're doing ten other things to get the kids out the door. Even oatmeal is not quite as easy.
Whether it's worth the nutritional trade off, I dunno. But we also make eggs a lot, which requires more time and attention, and usually I end up eating them cold myself when I get back after dropping everyone off.
Sugarless Kellogs with whole milk are super healthy and also very tasty. Unfortunatelt people end up eating junk such as frosty flakes with some milk substitute.
Sugarless Kelloggs don’t exist. Bare raw Corn Flakes are 8.4g of sugar per 100g. (Still better than “nature yoghurt” with 11g per 100g, knowing that a yoghurt is 125g).
1: different types of sugar
2: Apple would usually have much more raw fiber content = feel fuller for longer
3: because of first 2, it can be satisfying to eat a decent sized Apple for breakfast, with some water or coffee, but you'd have to otherwise have a whole bowl of cereal
Sugars are bad in that we only need so much of them and our brains are hardwired to be addicted to them/want more. Sugars from fruits are absorbed much more slowly than refined sugar.
Fats, sugars etc aren't inherently bad, there are healthy fats. But the main learning today is really that it's more about caloric intake (energy in, energy out) and it's easier to manage when fats/sugars & other carbs are delivered with foods that digest slowly/have a low GI - making us feel full for longer; it's better that our blood sugar experiences a constant slow release than spikes.
The problem is when we refine sugars & fats down and sprinkle them over _everything_ because "it tastes good". I can't believe American bread often contains a buttload of sugar. It's bread, not brioche!
Just use these cereal that say "Contents: corn" with no sugar. I believe that some Kellog's qualified, but that could be some time ago. Bingo: They will have some sugars, but these are natural corn sugars which would absorbed slowly.
Milk also contains slow-ish sugars, not refined sugar.
The problem here is Kelloggs is a brand from the era in which western nutritional diseases exploded and it's products reflect that. Corn flakes without added sugar are made by others and are like 3% carbs.
I think what he means to say is that without the influence of advertising that may falsely promote its health benefits, breakfast cereal can seem less meaningful.
There are so many great first-meal options! I still like oatmeal, but sometimes it's sprouted grains and legumes with whatever veg from the local farm that no one else is going to eat, and beets. I make most of the family meals and because I'm recovering from GERD also I make my own different lower-impact meals (without garlic, onions, tomatoes, citrus, coffee, chocolate, or alcohol), usually in the microwave on lower power for longer (cubed beets cook well this way: 8-10min at 30% power in a 1100W microwave), otherwise too much water leaves as steam. I'll add nutritional yeast and homemade kimchi for taste, or the yeast and some soy sauce in the evening (the last batch of kimchi has some garlic in it, and I'll risk eating small amounts earlier in the day).
Hydration: I've noticed that I'm not so thirsty anymore, eating meals with so much vegetable matter, possibly because there's a lot of water in amongst the fiber and it gets freed up during digestion?
As someone with chronic GERD, I am really interested to know your recipes, how many meals you take and your food preparation technique. Are these any cooking websites/channels you would recommend?
In my university years, I used to eat whatever was cheap and available easy, the result was my GERD symptoms were so bad most nights I couldn’t get full night sleep. Over time I noticed some common triggers. Black pepper, garlic, raw tomato (weirdly cooked tomatoes don’t trigger as much symptoms), any citrus fruits, carbonated drinks to name a few. Mostly it was learning by suffering. I make conscious efforts now to avoid food with these triggers and manage the symptoms quite a bit when I am not traveling. But some nights still end up waking up with intense upper esophageal pain. Honestly over the years the sad truth I have now realized is fasting is sometimes better than consuming types of things now a day that we call food.
I hear you- it really sucks when I eat too much/too late in the day/the wrong thing and also am too tired to stay awake and digest. Sometimes I have fallen asleep in a comfortable chair as a workaround, and I've started using antacid tablets now and then but they're uncomfortable and I don't want to rely on them. I used omeprazole for a cumulative month while I rehabituated to eating smaller, more frequent meals and stopping around 4pm.
I don't have any GERD-specific resources to suggest, as I have a solid foundation from childhood of eating minimally-processed food from the garden and local farmers. To cook for my family I use the NYT Cooking app because it's easy, and cookbooks from the library. Ayurvedic cookbooks, Instant Pot cookbooks, anti-inflammation cookbooks; all have some good options.
I absolutely love eating, not just in the moment but how I feel after a good meal. When I'm stressed, however, I tend to eat easy foods that are less healthy; feels good in the moment, but not so great afterwards, kinda like Rand al'Thor (in Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time) might feel reaching through that oil-slick taint (a difficult word to use with a straight face here...) to access the Source. So, I work to take care of myself in general so that the gestalt is positive; better action begets better actions. It doesn't always work, and when it's a downward spiral the best I can do is forgive myself, not let my failures get in the way, and keep at it. Good luck!
There's foods that trigger GERD for me, and I used to roll around the floor every night in agony, not knowing quite what was going on, as it was my norm.
To fix late night issues, I just have to eat before 6pm.
Chew properly. Soups kill me. And anything tomato sauced based is out.
Also weirdly oatmeal can trigger issues for me. But I can get away with it in the morning. I think it's also a chewing issue.
A huge amount of digestion happens in the mouth. So now I get my partner to pre-chew most of my foods for me.
It was a joke, of course I don't get my partner to chew my foods for me. The blending is not so much the issue. It's the saliva being an important part of the digestive process that counts. Blended soups can upset my gut, probably as I don't chew.
"Hydration: I've noticed that I'm not so thirsty anymore, eating meals with so much vegetable matter, possibly because there's a lot of water in amongst the fiber and it gets freed up during digestion? "
That's one reason. The other reason is, that the more sugar you eat, the more water you need.
I'm getting better at not eating "just because" or based on what time of day it is or that I won't be able to eat for a few hours (trying out fasting a few times helped me be okay with going without- I'm not going to die that easily. Probably has roots in a stressful childhood where eating was an escape from family strife). Sugary foods are so easy to eat and a difficult treadmill to dismount. So far it's like a local maximum that's still too easy to roll off of but it feels so good up there when it all comes together.
Fasting is the most easy for me, when I am busy (preferable in nature on a hike). But when I am at home, surrounded by all kinds of food and kind of bored - then yeah, it can be hard.
There's instant oatmeal. The kind that comes in packets and you just add water. Often has sugar added, often slathered with sugar. Possibly worse than a bowl of corn flakes. Highly processes with most of the starches and cellulose (fibre) reduced to simpler forms and readily and rapidly converted to glucose in the gut. High GI. Almost like candy.
There's quick-cooking AKA minute oatmeal. Gelatinizes in 3 minutes on the stove or the microwave. Still processed so the starches are easily digestible (that was the point when it was invented). Slightly better than instant oatmeal and corn flakes but still mid-level GI and GL.
Finally, there's oat meal. Steel-cut oats are just the seeds of the oat plant lightly crushed into large pieces. Not pre-cooked. Most palatable when cooked overnight. Very high in non-digestible fibre, mostly still complex starches that take considerable time to convert into glucose in your digestive system. Low GI.
It's oat meal that is most associated with glucose and blood pressure control, not so much oatmeal. Rule of thumb: the longer it takes to prepare, the more it takes to digest and the better it is for you if you're concerned about a healthy diet.
But the point is that oatmeal is not oatmeal, and discussing it as if it is is always going to be misleading.
I'm a type 1 diabetic and get to monitor my blood sugar level, and there's just not much difference in between these oatmeal styles when it comes to digesting the carbs.
My point was I've eaten cereal most of my life, in the form of rolled oats or steel-cut oats (and now increasingly using oat groats), not the sweetened stuff that comes in little packets, and recently been happy to branch out, inspired in part by memories of breakfast in Japan.
Maybe it's a regional thing, but "breakfast cereal" is exclusive of "oatmeal" where I'm from (despite oats being a cereal grain). Breakfast cereal is crunchy and served cold, neither of which applies to oatmeal (even overnight oats are cold but not crunchy).
Overnight oats / bircher muesli is served cold and requires no cooking. The time aspect is to give the oats time to absorb the liquid - cold oats swimming in freshly poured milk isn't the most appetising way to eat oats.
Of course you can "speed up" the process by blending them into a smoothie.
You can (overnight oats), but it's still not crunchy.
If you toast the oats first to make them crunchy, it's no longer the dish called "oatmeal" (which is a porridge) but now it's a kind of granola, which can be used as a breakfast cereal.
It contains protein and is low sugar (unless you cover it in honey and fruit everyday, but even then, at least you’d be getting some actual nutritional value)
Here are the UK figures for Cheerios multigrain and Quakers rolled oats. Cheerios have 17x the sugar. I think they used to be worse in the past before UK sugar regulations led to lots of changes to breakfast cereals.
I use 100g because they have different servings amounts. In the UK, the serving size is just 30g not 39g.
I would note that reducing such foods to tables can miss the point. They make me feel very different to eat. One is a very moreish sugary frankenfood that makes me lose control of my appetite. I can eat it by the box. The other is something that makes me feel good but if I make too much, I'm done and can't finish it. Eating an excess is physically hard.
I haven't seen a sugar-free variety in UK supermarkets. Standard Cheerios have always been sweet. I would call the "sweet" varieties things like Honeynut which have 22.4g of sugar per 100g.
The "low sugar Vanilla O's" sound ridiculous but contain comparable sugar to base Cheerios.† Presumably they have more vanilla flavoring.
† Which is to say, there's still a bit of added sugar, but not much, just like in the base Cheerios. (The rolled oats have no added sugar. The difference between "1g" of sugar in 40g of American rolled oats and "1.1g" in 100g of British rolled oats must be down to either different oats or rounding errors.)
I feel like the constant addition of relatively small amounts of sugar to random foods that aren't even supposed to be sweet might be a bigger issue than the inclusion of big heaps of sugar in foods that are supposed to be sweet. It's difficult to find beef jerky that is less than 10% sugar by weight. Rice Krispies are also 10% sugar by weight. There's no good reason for this.
If you ask for Cheerios in the UK, this is what you get. If you get an own-brand Cheerio knock off called "Hello Loops" or something, they will have also the same level of sugar.
Might explain some of the confusion in this thread.
Cereals are typically more processed than oatmeal (especially when we talk about uncut oat meal). If we talk about instant oatmeal vs cereal, then I don't know it matters a lot, sure.
0g sugar per 60g serving size. Do I now conclude that you were trying to fool me into thinking oatmeal contains less sugar than cereal when in fact it contains much more?
No, that's nonsense, oatmeal is a kind of cereal. The amount of sugar in it isn't even related to whether it's oatmeal.
Oatmeal (if unsweetened/unflavored) has about the same GI as orange juice or cake made from some Betty Crocker boxed cake mixes and is just slightly lower-GI than the American formulation of Coca-Cola (see #333 Oatmeal (Canada), GI value of 54 ± 4 in the table at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...).
I think oatmeal and other high-GI foods are promoted as low-GI in hopes of helping wean diabetics and pre-diabetics off of even worse foods (e.g. something really bad like powdered donuts), akin to how methadone is used to try to help heroin addicts. But genuine low-GI foods would be things like eggs, cheese, or chicken breast (all with nearly 0 GI) or some raw veggies like raw broccoli or the greens in a leafy salad (in the neighborhood, roughly, of 10-20 GI). Cooking low-GI vegetables like broccoli defeats the purpose and raises its GI to around the same value as oatmeal.
I wrote oats, not oatmeal (I don't think we really use that term in the UK). AIUI "Oatmeal" can refer to various things, including high GI porridge.
I only buy steel-cut oats, which various sources on google say are around 42 GI [0][1]. I do concede that any form of oats are on the upper-end of low and/or medium, and aren't some magic super food and one should not focus just on GI.
Steel cut oats are definitely better than most breakfast cereals however.
Joel Fuhrman in his book on reversing diabates also recommends small portions of oats (but mostly says to eat veggies).
It's literally a "cereal grain". It's found alongside the sugar pops, bran flakes, and cheertios on grocery aisles.
YOU might not think it's an alternative, but it very much is a cereal.
I do not understand "breakfast" at all. When I wake up usually the last thing I want to do is start eating, but if I were hungry I'd want something salty and savory and high in protein, steak or a roast, fish, pork ribs, something like this.
The amount of sugar in basically all breakfast foods is just insane, then people actually pour even more sugar on top. I don't understand how people can eat this type of food to begin with, but especially first thing in the morning.
I used to not be a breakfast person, especially if I had to do my 20k cycle to work -- cycling on a full stomach is horrible. The high once I got to work would sustain me until 11:30, where I would usually get an early lunch.
Since I've moved in with my SO, I no longer live so far from work, nor do I cycle as often. If I eat nothing in the morning I need to drink 2-3 coffees to not feel hungry until lunch. If I eat breakfast, I feel fine -- I no longer need those 2-3 coffees before lunch.
I think somewhere in my 20s I mixed the signals for hunger and attention fatigue and somehow decoupled one from the other.
> I do not understand "breakfast" at all. When I wake up usually the last thing I want to do is start eating
Your case is a minority. I'm guilty myself of this kind of thinking, so instead of saying "I don't understand people doing x" I try to ask myself "why do people do x?" or "why am I different than other people?".
Bodies are just really adaptable. If you eat sugar for breakfast from being a kid, or even just for a few days, you’ll start craving sugar in the morning.
On the other hand if you skip breakfast for a week, you’ll start waking up and not feeling that hungry.
> The amount of sugar in basically all breakfast foods is just insane, then people actually pour even more sugar on top. I don't understand how people can eat this type of food to begin with, but especially first thing in the morning.
Did you try adding more sugar ? That usually does the trick if the food is too bland. Rule of thumb when I was a kid was that the spoon should stand upward on its own once you have finished. /s
When I wake up, I have very low blood sugar. I feel just like you -- the last thing I want to do is start eating -- but I've learned from experience I absolutely need a jolt of carbs including a decent dose of sugar to kick-start my brain and my day, just to bring my blood sugar up to a normal functioning level. Otherwise I'm much less productive the whole morning.
I'm not a dessert person, I don't have a sweet tooth. I'll happily munch on steaks and ribs all day long. But at the start of the day, they simply won't bring my blood sugar up to a functioning level in any reasonable amount of time.
> high in protein, steak or a roast, fish, pork ribs, something like this.
I do not understand this "meat" thing at all. When I'm hungry, the last thing I want is dead animal flesh. If I'm hungry I prefer something fresh and plant based like carrots, tofu, apples, or something like this.
The amount of meat in basically all diets is just insane, then people actually pour even more animal products on top. I don't understand how people can eat this type of food to begin with, but especially as part of their staple diet.
Are you vegan or vegetarian? I changed my diet to >90% vegan a few months ago and noticed the occasional cravings for meat completely disappeared pretty quickly. I suspect it has something to do with a change in gut microbiome.
Could never understand people who order a stack of pancakes / waffles first thing in the morning. You couldn’t find a more malnourishing meal. Hell, have a burger and fries instead.
Same. And it wouldn't be sleep. It would be some restless, bizarre sugar coma where I can't get out of bed and must continue sleeping, even though my glucometer assures me that everything is fine.
It's in the name break fast. They say fasting is unhealthy and you NEED to eat X times/day. Which is obviously BS. There's no NEED to eat in the morning.
If one eats lots of sugar/carbs then sure it's difficult to wait for the next meal and cycle again.
Ha. I've slowly realized that I think there is an American version of this thread interlaced with a non-American version. The two replies here are the perfect distillation of it.
The other reply was about rice krispies with a spoonful of sugar, which, as an American, is what I was thinking of.
But your reply makes me think you aren't American, and are thinking of stuff like muesli or oats. (Because nobody puts syrup or honey on what we call "breakfast cereal" in the US.)
Even healthy cereal is incredibly energy dense, we have no need for it unless you're active enough (not so many wfh developers). That aside so many cereals (esp in America) are just sugar bombs.
Children could do with a solid energy dense breakfast, less sugar more plain oats & other cereals. Adults, it depends. But nobody needs coco puffs, except only as a treat.
I take great joy in watching Millennials reject the absurdity that we inherited, like buying diamonds, pretending cable news is news and carb loading every single morning before sitting most of the day.
Diamonds are plentiful and now easy to mass produce; we even accept the reality of blood mines. Mainstream news media is by and large lying to us for their owner’s gains, whether that be politically, economically, or culturally. And finally most of the dietary information the government drilled into us about things like the “food pyramid” was wrong from the beginning and we’re again only just accepting that. Just like how we’re finally accepting that eggs and meats are good for you and that maybe the multi-billion dollar food industry selling us delicious bags of pure calories is evil in every respect.
I think "everything we learned is a lie" is also a "lie." The news media seems to be full of people that are very similar to "normal people," like our parents and prior generations, that were and are trying to over-confidently distill certainty from vast and abundant ambiguity, and do so somewhat poorly. It's also amazing how forgiving our societies are, or how readily we escape personal consequences for mild to relatively serious false beliefs, and how slow we are to correct, even in the face of mounting evidence. It sometimes seems that while we may progress in some areas, we regress equally in others, like there's a natural conservation of folly, generation after generation of random walks. Maybe there's something adaptive to gullibility, because it surely hasn't killed off enough to diminish the prevalence. But I agree, every generation seems to confidently crystalize a gestalt of falsehoods, and pass those on to a new generation that are in the midst of over-correcting their own way to a new crystalized gestalt of falsehoods.
news agencies may well be full of real normal people with interests roughly aligned with the common man, but they're owned by strange rich people with interests usually completely at odds with those of the common man. the issue isn't one of accuracy or inaccuracy, or a failure of a valid attempt, it's one varying degrees of success at attempts to do something other than honestly tell you what's happening in the world.
all news agencies larger than a certain size should either be non-profit or publicly-owned
The point is that you only care about discovering these lies when things aren’t going good. When success is effectively trivial, why would anyone act antisocially.
It’s only after we have an obesity epidemic so people start questioning whether our cereals have become candy.
Are standard cheerios really that unhealthy? They’re easy - 3 cups (two servings) with some almond milk is only 315 calories and they’re packed with fortified vitamins. Three cups is also a lot.
It’s a pretty convenient food.
Sure the super sugary ones aren’t great for you, but generally I like cereals and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries).
Depends on what the rest of your diet looks like, yea 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.
If the rest of your day is high protein, and you have a good macro nutrient count, I guess it’s fine.
If you’re in a time crunch (heh) you can always skip breakfast? A lot of my peers have started doing that (out of laziness) and we are all fine.
There’s a product called magic spoons that does keto* cereal. They’re a lot more expensive, and they stick to your teeth a little. But I liked them when I had them. Food for thought (heh).
Not everyone needs to be doing keto (especially if you’re active and doing cardio) - though getting protein in your diet I think is one of the few things that’s generally agreed to be good (I just use whey powder shakes as a vegetarian).
I do often skip breakfast also, but will typically have cheerios as my first food around 1pm or so.
There’s just so much snake oil nonsense with nutrition information that I’m highly skeptical of most claims.
You're right to be skeptical. There's a lot of agendas, signalling, contrarianism, and ignorance involved in the area of nutrition.
Cheerios are perfectly healthy for almost everyone. You don't need to buy an expensive buckwheat quinoa kale macadamia nut SuperFood(tm)
A lot of the anti-carb stuff is from people who think eating meat all the time is best and don't want to hear different. Even if you (falsely) believed your ancestors were mainly hunters, that doesn't mean they were eating only supermarket steaks made of muscle tissue. They would've been eating all the tissues. Organ meats. Bon apetite.
Cereals can be healthy, but Cheerios are a refined form which is obviously sub-optimal. If you want a carbohydrate rich breakfast, a fiber-rich alternative like steel cut oats provides superior benefits.
Agreed. But if I were to rank Cheerios, they would rank quite high. No added sugar or sweeteners. Important vitamin fortifications. No fillers or other bad stuff. And oats aren't bad in terms of glycemic load and aren't a common allergen. I would give Cheerios either a B+ or A- whereas steel cut oats are like an A
Dr McDougall suggests 80% of calories should be from complex carbohydrates, and it’s a diet that has worked well for many— especially for diabetics and people with heart / blood pressure problems. I think it’s really hard to know exactly what is good vs bad for any given individual.
The really basic thermodynamic approach of just measuring calories has fallen out of fashion for some reason, but given that both protein and fat just reduce down to carbs and simple sugars after a certain point, it seems to me that the relative differences between them are overrated. Macronutrient ratios probably just don't matter that much as long as you are meeting your essential amino and fatty acid levels, which is extremely easy to do in a developed country.
There are some important and complex considerations with respect to certain things like gut flora, for instance. Or people with particular genes that change how their metabolism works, or their liver enzymes. But nutrition science is primitive and self-contradictory at the moment. We lack the knowledge to provide a personalized medicine approach.
My breakfast consists a cup of coffee (no sugar) since my teens. I'm just not hungry in the morning.
I eat a good breakfast only if I need to do an intense effort, or if I cannot control when I'm going to eat for lunch (business trips can have difficult schedules..).
> 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.
Most of what you need in your diet is "empty calories". One must carry on, thermodynamically speaking. Last night at dinner I had ~500 calories of rice, which was barely enough to compensate for an hour of moderate bicycling. If a person's lifestyle is so sedentary that they can't even sink 300 calories of carbs, the problem in that scenario is the inactivity, not the carbs.
Same here. Took me years trying and failing. What worked for me was a full stop on sugar and avoiding supermarkets, gasoline and train stations at the beginning.
I read recently that sugar is disappearing from the average the kitchen cupboard in the Netherlands. Inspired by this my wife and me ritually disposed our sugar jar that was indeed unused for a long time.
I indeed recently noticed that we still only have a sugar jar for my parents in law. Nobody else’s we know has sugar in their coffee or tea, and we hardly use it for cooking. I do stir fry chicory in honey on occasion btw :). Also sweet soy sauce or oister sauce is still a sugar source. Breakfast of the kids is still boterham with hagelslag sadly. I’m also from the Netherlands btw, if the hagelslag didn’t give it away.
In the grocery story the other day, I noticed Kit Kat cereal on the shelf. Who would buy that and consider it an even remotely nutritious meal, I don’t know.
> Who would buy that and consider it an even remotely nutritious meal, I don’t know.
While I wouldn’t consider it nutritious, my kids have definitely gotten me to impulse purchase them lots of these goofy cereals like Reese’s puffs and Icee cereal. Almost always they try them and say they are disgusting and want to go back to the classics: Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Fruity Pebbles etc.
It's a nutrient. This is an enumerable set of chemicals. Balancing nutrition is a different matter entirely.
> In the quantities we're all taking about, it's hard to say these "breakfasts" are positively contributing though.
I eat sugary cereals every morning, and it's about half my daily sugar consumption. I don't see any problem with it—I don't have diabetes, I have a healthy weight, etc. The idea that foods are somehow inherently bad because they're sugary is ridiculous. It's the eating habits that are unhealthy, not the food. Sugar isn't rat poison ffs.
I'm guessing rat poison in low enough quantities probably isn't rat poison either.
The problem is to some people sugar is also more addictive than alcohol or their favorite recreational drug. I'm going out on a limb and guessing rat poison isn't as addictive to rats.
> The problem is to some people sugar is also more addictive than alcohol or their favorite recreational drug.
That's not a sugar problem, that's a consumption problem. It's also a necessary nutrient to function, so it's addictive somewhat by definition, like water is addictive, or oxygen is.
This is taking the argument to extreme limits, you have to admit? I'm aware of no widespread instances of people self-reporting craving more oxygen than they need to function. There's probably a reason why there isn't an equally prevalent term like "sweet tooth" for many of the other daily required nutrients. It's probably because there aren't that many nutrients that illict an addiction that causes excessive consumption of said nutrient in a single day.
Warfarin is a particularly good example of the dose making the poison, as it is both a rat poison and a common prescription medication for people who are at risk of blood clots. An anticoagulant can be a useful medication, but taking too much is dangerous.
type and how you consume sugar matters. HFCS is really really bad for you or consuming sugars in fruits with fiber lowers the insulin spike and absorption rate.
So I’m sorry but some sugary foods ARE inherently bad and sugary cereals are one of them and that’s not even getting into the addiction side of it and how marketing them to kids sets many up for obesity and chronic diseases
I don't deny this at all, but this still requires context to determine "health". I truly resent the conception that sugar is somehow a toxin and not a necessary nutrient.
I also don't want to truly deny the addictive nature of sugar. It can have enormously negative effects on peoples lives. The answer is not to reject sugar, though! It is to moderate sugar intake.
so is iron, selenium, fats, proteins etc. dosage makes the poison.
consider that in nature, the only way to get anything nearly as sugar dense as sugar was to invade the nests of territorial colonies of venemous wasp like insects. getting a spoon full of sugar took guts and commitment!
Sugar is a subset of carbohydrates which is a macronutrient. But you don't need sugar specifically if you want carbs and in fact it is a bad carbo alternative unless you are doing some vigorous activity and need a little boost.
Personally though I eat a lot of it myself. Ideally I would only get maybe 15 grams of sugar a day, tops.
> But you don't need sugar specifically if you want carbs
That's what carbs are. Carbs are sugars. I don't see many people out here living off formaldehyde. If you eat bread, it's metabolized into sugars. If you eat potatoes, these are metabolized into sugars. I don't get the point.
I’m very active and I still avoid them. It takes barely more effort to make some scrambled eggs and toast/eggos for the same calories as a bowl of sugary grain and tastes better too.
> It takes barely more effort to make some scrambled eggs and toast/eggos
Making scrambled eggs isn't all that hard but surely you see that pouring some cereal and milk in a bowl is a fraction of the effort, even if the absolute difference isn't that huge?
The difference in effort is not appreciable enough for me to consider it if I have the time to sit down and eat at the table anyways.
The only time I would be concerned would be if I was pressed for time - in which case I’d be looking for something like a granola bar or protein shake over cereal.
It's just objectively not good food with a glycaemic index approaching soda, very short satiety, and limited nutrition value. It's a mix of things we blame for the obesity epidemic, all in one convenient meal.
The "breakfast of champions" slogan, given how popular it became, sounds like it would make for an interesting case study where people agreed to marketing, even if their individual experiences must have been that the food isn't really as filling as other options. Maybe it's a breakfast of sports champions who eat it as pre-workout, but surely it's not a breakfast that makes champions.
It could be good food. You can make a profit whilst serving the public good, that’s something corporations just can’t get into their heads.
Nestlé in Europe has made a few versions with more whole grains and less sugar, with no detectable change in taste. For a while, I was eating rice-based low-sugar breakfast cereal with added vitamins, simply because the alternative was a pastry and coffee (very busy work weeks). I despise Nestlé, but, hey, at least here’s a healthier version of our product — not healthy, healthier.
The race to the bottom in terms of sugar and additives might also be a factor as to why breakfast cereal is in decline. Make better products and we’ll buy them.
Corporations often do serve the public good. They just don't become very successful doing that. The most successful corporations are always the ones that cater to public desire, which is only sometimes aligned with public good.
> You can make a profit whilst serving the public good, that’s something corporations just can’t get into their heads.
A much simpler explanation that also makes a lot more sense in my opinion, since I do believe corporations are rational (if somewhat sociopathic) actors, is that products that cater to “the public good” often simply aren’t very popular.
It’s also incredibly reductive to use a term like “the public good” with no elaboration whatsoever, as if this was some kind of axiom that we can all agree upon.
Is the public good to maximize duration of life, quality of life, multitude of choice or something else entirely? And who gets to decide?
Saying that food with a high glycemic index is simply “not good food” shows a lack of understanding regarding what the glycemic index indicates and what constitutes “good food”.
There’s food with a high glycemic index that is most certainly not “bad food” (like fruit), and there’s food with a low glycemic index that definitely could be by what I assume is your criteria (like butter).
Also the statement “cereals have a high glycemic index” isn’t even true, since some of them do (like corn flakes), while some of them don’t (oatmeal, which is close to oranges).
Fruit that I would consider as good food have a lower GI than your favorite cereal, so your argument that there exists high GI food that works well as good food, doesn’t stand. Bad example. There’s definitely fruit out there that I would only rarely touch.
That is an interesting chart. Apparently the breakpoint between medium and high is 70, and some just barely squeaked in under that in the upper 60s. That doesn’t inspire a lot is confidence.
It depends on the person, I suppose. For me, GI=55+ is quite high. Soda and cola is 60, and those are go-to for raising blood glucose in people with type 1 diabetes. Something that has emergency use properties for raising blood glucose fast and by a lot doesn't feel like it is very healthy to consume all the time.
And besides, I think we all decided that sugary soda is unhealthy. But we still consider cereal healthy. They both seem to trigger a similar metabolic response, and have a similar satiety profile.
Everyone chooses for themselves, in their own circumstances, though. Even straight up eating glucose with caffeine makes for a great pre-workout mix in a pinch.
Sure, 55 may be considered high for someone with a medical condition, but saying “it depends on the person” is a strange way to phrase that. For most people it’s not high.
Some people are not fans of eating things approaching soda GI, as they have a feeling of a sugar rush, followed by a crash and hunger. No need for a medical condition - it can simply be a dietary preference.
It depends on the person and circumstance whether GI above 55 is high. Everyone needs to figure out for themselves, but it helps to be aware of GI in food and see how different GIs make you feel and function. And it helps to be aware that soda-type GI isn't considered very healthy by some, with ongoing debate.
Also, possibly 55+, 65+, or whatever arbitrary threshold is not too high for most people. There's some debate around that now. So I still think it doesn't hurt to be aware. But possibly.
To make matters more absurd, we took this product, dressed it in bright colors, marketed it towards children, and without a hint of irony, told their parents it’s the most important meal of the day?
I’m a lazy guy that is part of one of those elite gyms (kind of by accident, but it is what it is). As a result I get to see what actual elite athletes eat by virtue of being around that and I can assure you that these elite sports champions are not eating any form of cereal at all as part of their daily regimen.
I was a borderline elite athlete at one point, training with actual elite athletes. Most of what we ate would be considered a "wildly unbalanced diet", and when we were competing it was just large volumes of calorie dense food, be it pasta, protein bars or milk.
> The "breakfast of champions" slogan, given how popular it became, sounds like it would make for an interesting case study where people agreed to marketing (...)
I thought it was pretty clear that the "breakfast if champions" slogan was simply a reference to how they paid athletes, specially olympian medalists, to endorse their product.
It’s interesting that there is an uptick in private label brands.
The only options I can find that are not loaded with glyphosate, sugar or salt, and that also still have fiber in them are private label or from companies not included on the graph.
Post, General Mills, and Kellogs don’t sell organic options with their own branding, so all their stuff has glyphosate applied at harvest (search for: round up drying agent)
Kellogs owns Kashi which (I think is still organic), and the local stores don’t carry Kashi stuff that meets my requirements any more.
The manufacturers with reasonable offerings that I know of are: Amazon (365 whole foods market brand), nature’s path (privately held) food for life (38 employees; independent), and probably trader joes.
They all would either be excluded from the analysis in the article or put under “private label” which is increasing slightly over time.
However, their combined marketing budget is some tiny fraction of the companies pumping out unhealthy garbage.
Maybe if finding non-terrible cereal wasn’t a complicated project, then sales would start ticking back up.
Just go straight to the source and eat oatmeal. It’s nutritious, delicious (give it some time), and affordable. Cut out the corporate middle men from your consumption of abundant and cheap whole grains!
Goodness I’ve tried it so many times, even cheating and putting a little maple syrup in it, granola, cinnamon. Still can’t stand it. Reminds me of the gloop they eat in the matrix. I wish I liked it. Do you eat it plain?
I have oatmeal with dried fruit almost every day. The less processed the oats the better. I like steel cut or rolled oats with boiling water poured on it. Cooking for a long time makes it gloopy. Just need to rehydrate the oats.
I tend not to eat breakfast, but working from home, making nice oatmeal for lunch is easy and very filling -- I never need to snack before end of work and dinner. I'm sure for most people who do like to eat breakfast, it would work great as a breakfast. Everything is available at Costco in shelf/freezer-stable bulk quantities for quite cheap and at good quality, and it takes 5 minutes to make, which primarily consists of opening and closing bags, and cleaning the pot at the end -- the "cooking" is entirely passive:
- 1/4 cup sprouted oats
- bit less than a handful of frozen mango, frozen strawberries, 1 banana
- small amount of goji berries
- 1 tbsp ground flax
- 1/3 tbsp cinnamon
- 1 cup water
Stir to mix and then pressure cook in instant pot for 10 minutes. Prepare large eating bowl with:
- 1/2 cup frozen blueberries
- 1/2 cup walnuts
Pour porridge on top and mix (the frozen berries will defrost and bring everything to almost a good eating temperature, but leaving enough time to clean the pot before it has truly cooled enough). I guessed on a few measurements since I only really measure the oats, water, and powdered ingredients and eyeball everything else. Easy to adapt for >1 person.
I'd never bother trying to find a "healthy" cereal in a box as long as I had access to basic cooking and food storage facilities.
Try savory oats. I cook mine with curry and adobe, a little olive oil, nutritional yeast, chopped garlic, topped with chili crisp and a fried egg. Usually on top of a bed of sprouts or shredded red cabbage.
I know you're getting a bunch of suggestions but I'm going to throw in my stupid simple approach that I've loved.
First, if you don't like the texture, as others have suggested, go with steel cut oats or whole oats (I always get Quaker whole oats, cheaper than a lot of the steel cut oat brands).
I like my oats savory. I pretty much eyeball everything but I do about a little more than half a cup, add water until I can barely feel it through the top of the oats, microwave for 2 minutes. Then add a little bit of butter and salt, mix it up, and you've got yourself a breakfast.
Try other grains besides oats. Barley, rye (flakes), spelt, triticale, buckwheat groats. I mix a few with sunflower seeds and various dried fruits into a large batch of muesli that I eat raw. But it makes a great “oatmeal” too if cooked or soaked the night previous. Plain oats is so bland.
Don't even cook them or use milk. Finely cut oats, in cold water with a small quantity of raisins: "Oats and raisins". Let it soak a little to wet and soften, but not enough to turn it into high viscosity gloop like when cooked.
Here's a trick that I've done in the past: buy a Presto popcorn popper. You can then buy organic grains in bulk--wheat, barley, rye, even oat groats--and pop/parch them in the popper. You get the nutty flavor and bioavailability of breakfast cereal, but no secret additives and a guaranteed clean breakfast. If you prefer hot cereal, you can then mill (or grind) the roasted grains to make instant porridge--just add boiling water and stir. (You can also do the same with lentils and split peas, mix in dried seasonings, and have instant soup mix). All of the convenience, none of the packaging, none of the poison.
I think it's mainly because American's (really everyone) is getting savvier about health. 20 years ago, Kellogs could have convinced the public that their cereal were actually healthy through TV ads and such. But now with the internet it's impossible to convince anyone because the facts about sugar are out there and people are changing their behaviors.
If I had to make a bet I'd say in the next decade of so, Kellogs and other cereal manufacturers will kill off most of their cereal brands, keep a few well known brands around, and make a shift to the "healthier cereals" space that's occupied by these smaller players and private labels.
Just today I was shopping for cereals for our kids at French Carrefour. I dont eat it personally, so as usually a bit struggle for a guy in big mall to even find it.
Found normal section, tons of these known brands like Kellogs, when looking at content it was all 17+ grams of pure sugar amd looking very artificially. Huge shelves full of it. Fuck that, I aint going to ruin life of my kids.
Went to bio section of the store, picked up some Carrefour's branded oatmeal with few bits of thin slices of dark chocolate (unfortunately this was requirement), still 10g of sugars IIRC but much more fiber and overall looking more healthy.
Priming from TV ads is still strong, folks buy tons of that crap for their kids thinking how great parents they are (and they drown it with big glass of orange/apple juice, whats better than starting every day with 50g or more of raw sugars when you are 4 years old and weight 20kg).
I think it's a good thing it's in decline. Cereal for the most part is terrible for your health and wallet. There are far better alternatives for breakfast. Maybe people have started to realize that.
Indeed, its popularity was an artifact of mid 20th century ag industry marketing and influence over the USDA (food pyramid and school lunch guidelines), as well as ag industry subsides.
Poor health outcomes are a direct result of these subsides.
Yeah, this is a good thing. Breakfast cereal is dog food for humans. There are much healthier options. The only reason breakfast cereal has much nutritional value at all is because they add it artificially. Don’t get me started on the low fiber sugary cereals, that’s just pure garbage. Yes there are some healthier options, oats without added sugar is probably the best. But that’s cheap as dirt and hardly counts as cereal.
It’s just refined carbohydrates, a sprinkling of vitamins, and ton of sugar. You could be eating pastries with a multivitamin and you wouldn’t be doing any worse.
Yogurt or oatmeal and fruit is great. Eggs are amazing. My grandfather was a doctor who ate bacon and eggs every day. He made it to 90, died of prostate cancer. He didn’t eat sugar though. I tend to skip breakfast and go straight to lunch, otherwise I gain weight. I can’t personally do three meals a day. Everyone is different though.
I drink black coffee and usually a piece of fruit like a banana or an Apple (I don't really care for breakfast so much). Sliced blueberries and strawberries are amaze, too.
But unsweetened (Greek) yoghurt with some oats/"granola?" and chopped fruit (like strawberries) is amazing.
Energy in energy out, Adult intake for average activity level is like 2k kCal or 8k kJ or so. I usually think like 1500/6000 or so since I wfh.
Let's do American so take your 1500 kCal, maybe leave keep 800 for dinner, 500 for lunch, 200 for breakfast (and snack during the day). So just make sure your breakfast is 150-200kCal.
Apparently it's 90kCal for a large egg (78g), so you could have 2 maybe with a dash of sauce of some kind for breakfast just fine.
But otherwise you could have anything: https://travel.earth/breakfast-around-the-world/ just ensure food type/portion size is controlled and balanced for vitamins etc as well. Soups (Asia and other parts) look pretty good too so I may try adding that in myself to my routine.
There's a whole 'nother issue here and that is in America in particular, you tend to think you have to eat "breakfast food": bacon, sausage, eggs, pancakes, cereals, oats, juices full of sugar, etc.
Just eat regular food, during breakfast time. (Although eggs are fine)
Seconding this. I eat a lot of meal prep'd pasta or soup dishes, I just microwave a bowl from my fridge. I eat this for every meal, breakfast included. It's satisfying having warm, savory, "real" food. I don't dislike oatmeal, but I'd probably never choose it over more "real" food.
"part of a balanced breakfast / diet" always has been weasel words to the effect of "if you eat healthy foods as well as the product, then your overall diet will be somewhat healthy on balance".
See The McLibel case, 1997 (1) particularly the statement "You could eat a roll of Sellotape as part of a balanced diet" (2)
I notice I do a lot better on the days I eat peanut butter on toast for breakfast, often with a banana. Keeps you going for hours, usually not all that hungry by lunch
Lots of cereal is basically candy, which is why it's so darn delicious. I weaned myself off of it and now mostly skip breakfast, get a McMuffin if I want to be fancy, or grab a protein bar if I'm desperate.
I will treat myself to a bowl of Lucky Charms every once in a while, though.
If a McMuffin is your go to instead of cereal aren’t you just trading sugar for fat, cholesterol, and sodium? Doesn’t seem like a great replacement if health is important.
Yeah, they taste good and keep me sated for less calories than cereal would take. I see no need to further remove the remaining foods that bring me joy. I've lost 75 pounds so far just making trade offs to stay full with less calories and fats and protein seem to work best for that.
Fat and protein are also much more nutritious. Calories are not equal and making these trades while maintaining joy is good logic. My partner’s mantra for unhealthy food is “is this worth getting fat from?”. Which basically just means you end up eating better because it turns out the least healthy stuff is not actually bringing you joy anyway.
Consider the Egg McMuffin meal, which is a bundle of an Egg McMuffin, hash browns, and a small coffee.
That comes to 455 calories, 49g carbs (3g of which are sugar), 21g fat, 19g protein, 4g fiber, 1090mg sodium, and 250mg cholesterol.
That's 40% of calories from carb, 43% from fat, 17% from protein. That mix is fine on the carbs, a little high on the fat, and a little low on the protein.
The cholesterol is high (over 80% of the RDA for a 2000 calories diet), but for most people dietary cholesterol doesn't have much affect on blood cholesterol so this is only an issue for some.
The sodium is a little under 50% of the RDA for a 2000 calorie diet, so might be something to think about in conjunction with your lunch, dinner, and snacking plans for the rest of the day.
That's the key here. For most people there is no need to have every item of every meal or snack be nutritionally great in every way. Things just need to not be so far out of whack that they will cause immediate harm (e.g., not cause a large spike in blood sugar if that is something your body has trouble handling well).
What you need is for the average over time to be good, where the amount of variation you can have over the averaging period is larger the shorter the averaging period.
This, with a cup of black coffee, is probalby a lot better than a bowl of Froot Loops. The official per-serving calories for Froot Loops, with milk, is 210. But I would guess that most people eat at least 50% more, putting it as the same calories as the McMuffin. And you're less likely to be hungry again in 30 minutes.
Depends on the exact details, and obviously a McMuffin is not the _optimum_ thing they could be trading it for, but that is likely to be an improvement, yes.
Talk about sated, I lost 80 pounds eating fatty meats and kimchi every day for six months. I literally couldn’t eat more than 1200 calories or so.
People who haven’t updated their nutritional information priors live in this weird world where anything that tastes good is either too sugary or too fatty. Like, if that’s true, what are we supposed to eat? Baked Boneless skinless Chicken breast with no salt?
In fact, I worked with a lady whose job it was to put the “helpful nutrition grab and go” labels at the food company I worked for, and she had a lot of power over recommendations and her basic beliefs were humans should eat the blandest, least flavorful carbs and proteins, and anything that tastes good is bad for you.
Hard boiled eggs were a “red” item but a Cliff Bar was green. Her and I were friends and went on walks together every day, but we constantly got in arguments about what was healthy and what wasn’t.
Fats can also have high satiety which might make some people eat less.
I think that is part of what happened to me. My blood sugar levels were going up, despite no changes in diet or medication. I wanted to see how much dietary carb levels were affecting that, and decided to try lowering carbs. Nothing radical--just lowering from the 50-60% calories from carbs that is typical to around 40% [1].
I did not attempt to cut calories during this. In fact I did things that would increase calories of some items. E.g., if I was getting a sandwich (50% calories from carbs) I'd order it with mayo or extra cheese or extra meat to get the percent from carbs <= 40%.
Blood sugar did come down, but to my surprise so did weight. It turned out I was eating something like 30% fewer calories, because I wasn't hungry enough for more.
[1] I picked 40% because it is easy to calculate. If something is N calories, it is 40% from carbs if it has N/10 g of carbs. That makes it easy to keep a running total throughout the day of how many grams over or under you are from 40%.
I ate a diet where 80% of my calories were from fat and I struggled to eat more than 1300 calories in a day. I think unless you’re eating cheesecake every day (hyperpalatable foods where carbs + fat calories are near a 1:1 ratio) you’re not going to gain weight eating fat.
You are 20 years behind unless you are talking about about polyunsaturated vegetable oils. Canola, Soy, Cottonseed, and all other industrial seed oils are toxic trash and should be eliminated from your diet as far as possible. Saturated fat is essential for health. Cholesterol is nutritious. Animal fats are nutritious. Excess sugar and polyunsaturated oils will cause heart disease but not animal fat which is what we have been eating for millions of years. All of that bullshit advice against saturated fat and dietary cholesterol has been completely debunked many years ago. It was fraudulent science.
My relatives eat huge amounts of saturated fat and animal products many have lived to 100 years old (not a western diet). We don't have heart disease in my family. I've been mostly animal based for the past 20 years, eating multiple times the recommended daily allowance of saturated fat and cholesterol, and latest blood checks / blood pressure are perfect. Also cut excess sugar/carbs out of my diet 20 years ago. I am living proof for myself. Whenever I eat a meal high in canola oil I instantly feel like absolute shit, but I feel good after eating fatty red meat (burgers only with no fries or sugar drinks). The vegetable oil fries and soft drinks are what kills you. Not the burger.
This is social media health influencer level misinformation on saturated vs unsaturated fats. This is so well studied that you can just bring big meta analyses to the table.
If canola and other scary industrial seed oils are so bad, how come it improves health outcomes especially when swapped to from butter? How come canola has even more impressive nutritional profile than olive oil? How come unsaturated fats improve health outcomes when swapped to from saturated fats?
Industry research is fraud. Fake science for profit.
If you can honestly say that you feel good after eating anything fried in canola oil or soybean oil then I don't know what to tell you. Good luck with that. To me it is blatant garbage. It is disgusting rancid toxic waste. Inedible. I feel good after eating eggs or steak fried in clarified butter and have no cardio health issues whatsoever. Have been eating this way for decades. Blood checks are all good. No issues. None.
They were fine with trans fats being bad, but when saturated fats are also demonstrated to impact health outcomes by the exact same methodology, they resist it because it condemns their favorite foods.
The current state of research does not provide strong evidence for a link between saturated fats and cardiovascular disease: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20071648/
It seems the health benefits are contingent on what you replace saturated fat calories with (i.e. replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats does seem to reduce heart disease, but replacing them with processed carbs does the opposite.)
You're being downvoted and the replies to are condescending, but you are actually completely correct and the replies exhibit misinformed groupthink. Goes to show how powerful narratives being pushed YouTube personalities et al can be.
HNers are prob the perfect
demographic for the new crop of “meat is manly”, “butter is healthy”, “scientific consensus is wrong” social media influencers. You can see all the talking points in every nutrition related subreddit.
A lot of the comments here seem to he America centric. In the UK there's plenty of option for low sugar nutritious cereals. Even children's cereals by law must not contain too much sugar and must contain a certain level or nutrients.
Some of my favourite cereals are shredded wheat, cheerios, rice krispies. All very simple cereals. If you're feeling fancy you can have a porridge with jam or a granola with no fruits.
The only thing to say is the milk. I know a lot of people develop lactose interances as an adult so it might be troublesome to keep having such a high lactose intake. I think some milk alternatives are much nicer nowadays and add some of their own sweetness to cereal if you like that. I personally have no issues with my low fat dairy milk every morning
Cheerios contain round up, to the point where it should be listed as an ingredient. They apply it as a “drying agent” at harvest, then harvest before it can be washed off:
The practice used to be effectively illegal because it contaminates the harvested crop, but lobbyists got the government to increase legal limit of glyphosate in food by 300x to enable the practice. It’s a carcinogen according to the WHO and California.
Shredded wheat is fine, except it’s legal or use glyphosate on wheat as a drying agent at harvest.
All the organic cheerios I’v tried are terrible (any suggestions, internet?) I’ve had decent luck with pretty much every other type of organic cereal I have tried, however. I filter on low salt, low sugar and high fiber.
The last time I checked, spraying roundup directly on organic crops wasn’t allowed.
I love Shredded Wheat. I have mine with a almond milk and a tiny bit of peanut butter or even shards of dark chocolate. It's a delicious and healthy snack after dinner that satisfies a craving for dessert.
I think you are overestimating how healthy those are. Cheerios and rice krispies both have added sugar(yes UK versions). Shredded wheat is better but all three are still a very carb heavy meal, even with milk.
There’s plenty of options in America too - lots of low and no sugar brands. The comments do seem indicate otherwise. Maybe by “Breakfast cereal” people assume only Frosted Flakes and Fruit Loops and only from mainstream outlets like Kroger and Albertsons.
"This will leave Kellogg’s top management to focus on the more attractive snacking segment, with brands such as Pringles and Cheez-It, at a company renamed Kellanova."
Disgusting but probably. Cereal is at an interesting crossroads now. For a long time they were able to dupe the American populace into thinking that processed grains pumped full of sugar were “healthy” as long as they tossed a b complex tab in there. Now the American populace has finally wised up and I cannot say I feel sorry for the cereal big wigs
Both were this; the idea that breakfast cereal is good for you was largely a marketing creation, and it’s likely that the fact that it has become more difficult to lie about that to people in ads is likely at least partially responsible for the decline.
One company thrives on high sodium intake, the other on high sugar intake...
(Well, that isn't strictly true: Pop-Tarts and Nutri-Grain bars are going to Kellanova.)
When 12ish I realized that my mental clarity was actually better throughout school when I skipped breakfast because I was too late; and initially I just thought this: it was due to sleeping longer.
But I observed the same thing later in high school when I got up on time but forgot to buy milk and hence went to school fasted.
Back then, I thought "break(ing your)fast" was somehow important for your energy levels at the start of the day (good PR!) so I was hesitant to follow really through and I guess the latent sugar cravings did the rest (but I remember not being "hangry" as others described it).
Now, after experimenting with a lot of regiments, I know that I'm far better off by "skipping breakfast". As a general rule of thumb giving your body a rest time of 12 hours and not eating 2 hours before sleeping gives your body an additional strong signal for its diurnal coordination.
That being said I knew a very athletic guy who before sleeping devoured 3000kcal (he barely ate throughout the day) and then judging by his exceptional body composition and athletic achievements could recover excellently.
I think people _may_ have missed the joke here (it was dead) but cornflakes started off as a ‘health food’ marketed to do, well, just that (along with various other unlikely things). Lying about health effects has been an industry mainstay ever since.
Graham crackers were supposed to do the same! The cultural impact of puritanical thinking in the US is, IMO, really understated. It's amazing how many stupid things are anchored in Christian masochism.
I swear most of the comments on HN become this weird “how can I respond to this statement and connect the conversation to something negative even if it’s completely off topic”.
I know this isn't what you're saying, but I'm amused at the notion of a hypothetical person thinking that containers could leave the factory filled to 120% of volume so that they're at 100% of volume after settling, if only manufacturers would stop being greedy or something.
Is it really that expensive or impractical to settle the contents of cereal boxes (and potato chip bags) on the assembly line so they aren’t 20-40% air? I assumed that the fill level was something that manufactures co-evolved to — based on what their major competitors are doing and what they can get away with.
Potato chip bags are deliberately inflated with nitrogen. This preserves them (oxygen causes chips to go stale) and it protects them in shipping. The air pressure acts as a shock absorber. If they tightly packed these bags with product then a lot of it would be crushed into tiny crumbs.
It costs them money to ship a bunch of air to the stores. They can’t fit nearly as much product on a truck this way. They do it because it improves product quality, not because they’re trying to rip people off.
There’s one thing to not have chips bags tightly packed and another to have them a tiny amount of chips and the rest nitrogen filler. I think manufacturers got a bit too greedy at this point…
Yes, it requires sustained mechanical agitation for a period of time that you can't really accelerate without severely damaging the product. Add to that that you really can't start settling the product until _after_ its in the container. Maybe you oversize the bag, leave it open while settling (keep in mind that the atmosphere in the container is frequently not room air), before finally sealing and trimming off the excess? Or you could skip all that and just ship the same amount of product, using the same amount of packaging, and save the energy input and cycle time needed to pre-settle the product.
"half filled" is an extremely generous description, when the contents of the breakfast cereal box are carefully engineered to be ~95% air by volume, no matter how well-settled.
(Yes, I know about Grape-Nuts, and other cereals with far higher densities.)
- A few web sites say American (breakfast) cereal boxes are roughly 12" x 8" x 2" - so 192 cu. in., or ~3,150 cu. cm.
- Similarly, the product weight for a standard box of Cap'n Crunch(tm) cereal seems to be ~12oz. - so ~340g. (Frosted Flakes(tm), Cheerios(tm), and many others look pretty close to this.)
Divide those figures, and we get ~0.11g/cu. cm.
The actual density of carbohydrates is ~1.5g/cu. cm.
So, with a generous allowance for settling, I should have said "engineered to be ~92% air by volume".
More interesting: A couple searches say that wheat, from a farmer's PoV, is currently selling for ~$5.75 per bushel. And the standard wheat bushel weighs 60 pounds. So an "all-grain" breakfast cereal should yield ~80 12-oz. boxes from that $5.75 bushel of wheat...or about 7.2 cents per box.
Far, far better to be a big corporate middle-man than an American farmer or consumer, eh?
I have a friend in the industry. Back in the 90's when I was growing up, they mixed the sugar right into the dough. Now it's a glaze added on the surface, which dramatically reduced overall sugar content.
Is it a healthy breakfast? There are certainly better options with a little bit more effort. But it is far less unhealthy than it used to be.
For what it's worth, I stumbled on oatmeal with a bit of honey and berries as my go-to meal. A diabetic friend brought that up as a breakfast recommended by their dietitian, and I've seen it recommended other places as well. It takes 5 minutes to prepare in the microwave at 50% power to prevent overflowing, in which time I could have completely finished a bowl of cereal.
Oats has been one of my primary breakfasts for years. I use the microwave cooking time to brew a cup of pourover coffee.
It’s a bit pricey but in addition to berries I’ll also mix in freeze dried fruit, which is immensely more shelf stable than fresh without adding sugar.
I love overnight oats because it takes so little prep. Takes 10 minutes to prep, including making a batch of chopped fresh fruit, and lasts 5-7 days (I use non-dairy milk to reduce spoilage). I do eat it cold each day though.
If it microwaves in 5 minutes it's rolled oats, not oatmeal. Rolled oats are still pretty darned processed -- the milling and steaming process convert many of the complex starches and a good portion of the cellulose into easily-digested sugars and simple starches. The gelatinization in the microwave completes that process.
I imagine it's still better for you than a vat of Rice Krispies with milk and sugar but that's a low bar.
Agree. Also as a vegetarian that often picks vegan options, breakfast cereal is an important source of B vitamins and other nutrients for me as it's all fortified
Grape Nuts are actually pretty low on the nutrition scale (don't read the ingredients/nutrition box if you don't want to be depressed). Upgrade to Ezekiel 4:9 which is similar in concept but 100x more healthful.
The banana is adding so much sugar that isn’t really that healthy. Fruit on cereal is sorta like loading up a salad with dressing, croutons and bacon bits.
Bananas in particular are pretty high in sugar, and other than potassium their nutrient density is nothing special.
Jesus, please stop spreading this kind of nonsense. It’s totally fine for people to eat a banana 7 days a week, 365 days a year as part of their breakfast.
Also, their nutrient density is perfectly fine. It’s high in fiber, potassium, vitamin C, and vitamin B6.
that sugar comes with fiber though so it's okay. the problem is the sheer amount of just sugar, which eg frosted flakes has an overabundance of. A banana is fine.
Good. If my generation is responsible for ending the disgusting practice of pumping kids full of subsidized sugar and grain and trying to call it healthy I am proud of being part of the movement to end feeding kids this shit
I suspect fabric softener on that list is, like breakfast cereal, a victim of truth in advertising rules; you’re just not allowed lie about its efficacy like you use to be.
Diamonds, another product which makes no sense outside the context of marketing are presumably some other marketing failure, possibly just failure of the industry to address bad press.
> Companies like Coca-Cola and Kraft Heinz have begun designing their products so that their packages don’t have a true front or back, but rather two nearly identical labels — except for the fact that only one side has the required warning. As a result, supermarket clerks often place the products with the warning facing inward, effectively hiding it.
The plausibly healthful cold cereals in supermarkets I shop now are down to shredded wheat, the original Cheerios, and FiberOne (expensive). The protein thing is a sideshow; the requirement for protein is only 70 grams/day, so most Americans are way over-proteined, and the milk (non-fat, of course) on your cereal is going to give a decent amount. Put fresh berries on the cereal as often as possible, other fresh fruit in moderation otherwise.
In the Before Times, the cereal aisle was full of things like Wheaties, Cheerios, Total, Special-K, Chex, and other things that were, at least, not that terrible. They still had the Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs that Calvin liked, but they were at eye level for a kid in a grocery cart.
Now those cereals are still there, but obscenely overpriced, and the aisle is full of Calvin Cereals.
Remember kids, breakfast is the most important meal of the day (TM)! So make sure you start it huge dose of sugar dressed up in funny colors! This will all but guarantee you'll have a blood glucose crash in the early hours of your day, which is a sure fire way to make your day worse, but look at that cute lion! Isn't he fun!?
"even though cereal sales have been dipping consistently since the early 2000s, we're still looking at a $10 billion a year industry."
"millennials are more concerned than other groups with getting sufficient protein and fiber in the morning, and they aren't likely to see cereal satisfying that need. Millennials are also the most likely age group to say that cereal just gives them a sugar rush in place of actual energy."
"As everyone who knows their cereal history can tell you, the Baby Boomers were actually the ones who first got hooked on sugary cereal as kids. The industry found a huge boon when the Greatest Generation decided to market to them using cartoon tigers and cereals that were 50 percent sugar by weight—like Sugar Smacks. So instead of blaming the generation that lost its sweet tooth, maybe the onus belongs on the people who first thought that marshmallows for breakfast was a good idea."
I only eat between noon and 8PM, so I only eat lunch and dinner.
I do eat rolled oats on occasion though, about once a week when I don't have time to prepare my usual salad for lunch, I often stir in about a tbsp of cashew or almond butter.
Well, good. Wheaties was intentionally marketed refined flour and sugar to children and adopted sales tactics of big tobacco such as cartoon characters/mascots. Thus began the march towards ultra-processed foods and obesity.
In the US there are a resonable number of healthy cereals to pick from. The downside of cereal is milk. Ignorning lactose tolerance, 1 cup of milk has 12g of sugar - equivalent of three teaspoons of white sugar.
Oatmeal + milk warmed in the microwave for a minute, then add fresh or dried fruit. That's the only cereal I will eat. Everything else is tastes like cardboard or candy for kids.
This or bran cereal are both good options in my experience. Just make sure to watch for how much sugar is in it; some brands will sneak in sugar even in granola.
I tend to skip breakfast if I don’t have something very easy to digest at hand and unfortunately cereal is that. And I haven’t found other alternatives. My stomach is very weak in the morning but I don’t want to skip breakfast.
But I’m going to try some other options. My diet is much better after breakfast, I don’t know why I can only tolerate extremely easy to digest food at breakfast.
I never really had cereal for breakfast or any other meal (or does puffed rice count? I used that as a dinner dessert) and cereal with milk sounds pretty bad as a breakfast. I'm not lactose-intolerant but milk feels pretty “heavy” to digest. I don't want that in my stomach when I'm running out the door.
Another breakfast cereal for dessert person here. I haven't eaten breakfast for years because it's the meal I skip for intermittent fasting. But, when I want a dessert after dinner it's often one of the 'healthy' cereals with milk.
Slow to digest is good! Unless you need to get instantly into hard physical work in the morning it's better to have slow trickle of energy, at least for me, keeps me sated for longer.
As for cereals, I eat them with cocoa instead of milk, just add a spoon... far tastier.
I still eat sugar laden kids cereal every day since childhood. I am 58 now. I rarely exercise beyond walking 3-4 days a week. I have normal BMI, normal blood pressure, and I am not diabetic. I am not convinced they are as bad for you as some "experts" claim.
I used to love cereal, but the sugar content is too high, especially when it resorts to using high fructose corn syrup. I've tried to find other cereals that don't have as much or no sugar, but… It just feels overly manufactured and engineered. Not the cereal I grew up with.
It seems like an opportunity to reinvent the form of "cold something to hydrate." Meusli's are still very high sugar (Alpen being the main example) and cereal in general is absolute garbage food.
There are some interesting attempts by a company called Holy Crap Cereals (holycrap.com), and they use ingredients like chia seeds (which expand in liquid) in their "skinny bitch," cereals. The branding attracted attention anyway. One of the ingredients in higher end muesli is whey, which is as pure a protein source as one can get.
Yes, though it's often considered a premium product. Given the exorbitant price per gram of "standard" prepared breakfast cereals, that might not be too much higher though.
Trader Joe's Muesli is quite good and reasonably priced. Ingredients are whole grain oats, sunflower seeds, raisins (raisins, sunflower oil), rice crisp (brown rice, caramelized pear juice concentrate, sunflower oil), pumpkin seeds, coconut, dried apples and sliced almonds.
It's $4/lb or about $0.25/oz, as compared with $0.30/oz for Kellogg's Corn Flakes ($5.29 @ 18 oz.).
Many stores will have a selection of "healthy" or whole-grain cereals, often smaller labels. Prices can vary considerably, especially at premium markets (e.g., Whole Foods or local specialty markets). Even general-product markets often carry these, though there are many granola-flavoured candies out there as well with sugar as one of the top ingredients, often 2nd place on the list.
The other option is to buy a mix of whole grains, nuts, fruit, etc., and mix your own.
The premium brands are often produced by the same companies in similar factories with similar ingredients. They just market them differently and…charge more. The same with generic store brands actually (same factory, lesser price). They are looking to capture as much profit and market share as possible.
Sounds reasonably priced, considering I see some boxes of breakfast cereal (basically reconstructed corn flour dust with sugar) at 4 or 5 dollars per box.
For US products, scale and agricultural policy (strongly preferring bulk grain, sugar, and processed-food production) has a large part to play. Another huge element is advertising, particularly children's advertising, of high-sugar cereals.
I'm wondering if part of the decline of the processed-cereal market isn't due to the general decline in television watching and cord-cutting.
Flipside is that similar advertising is likely to migrate to games and child-focused online video. If it hasn't already.
(I'm not part of the audience of either, nor would my extensive ad-blocking allow me to see what's being targeted to such content.)
I used to eat shredded wheat with extra bran every day just to maintain a high fiber intake. Then the price of milk got too high to justify it so now I eat instant oatmeal made with water. Gets the job done well enough.
I could not stand oatmeal while being a child. Now it is my favorite breakfast dish, alongside eggs. Plain or milk based - no matter. I don't know how it happened, but it is a blessing approaching my 50.
Trash food deserves to be in the trash heap of history.
That said, it’s great humanity learned to produce more food than we need then ways to process and store it for years later. Hopefully we’l never need that knowledge again.
Good riddance. It's basically junk food now--it's loaded with sugar, HFCS, and preservatives. There's glyphosate in Cheerios! It's probably one of contributing causes of childhood obesity.
Breakfast cereal has this problem: everything in the cereal isle of a typical supermarket is way overpriced for what it is, and the size and weight of the boxes. And you still need milk with it.
It's really sad if its really "on the go" stuff that causes this. Do people really do not have time to pour some milk or milk alternative on some cereal anymore. Like WTF?
I switched to yogurt. I like eating Greek yogurt (lately Fage 0% fat) with blueberries, granola, hemp seeds, and chia seeds. It seems like the adult version of breakfast cereal to me.
It's also an utterly saturated market. There seems to be more competition around who can make the loudest box than even caring about what's inside of it.
Well, it doesn’t really matter what’s inside of it, does it? In the end it’s all ground up wheat or ground up corn with a shit ton of sugar and a vitamin thrown in there, so really that is the only way these companies can compete. In the end they’re all selling the same product, so the box is really the only differentiator
In the dim glow of the morning light, Randy's kitchen morphed into a dangerous playground of illicit indulgence. His hands, trembling with equal parts anticipation and fear, clutched the red box – Captain Crunch, a ticket to another dimension, a realm of mania and delirium where each gold nugget was laced with that potent sugar, a crystalline substance so powerful, it could send a man hurtling through the universe, teetering on the edge of madness. The legend of its potency was whispered in dark alleys, tales of brave souls venturing too deep, taken by its spell, their sanity a small price for that euphoric trip. And Randy? Well, he was all in, craving the rush, the thrill, the unpredictability of it all.
He set the stage with a meticulousness that only those who've danced with the devil can understand. The milk – not just any milk, but UHT, cold, almost frozen, a liquid gateway that would potentiate the drug's effects, making the experience a maelstrom of sensation. As the milk splashed onto those gold nuggets, the chemical reaction was immediate and fierce. The world around began to dissolve, his senses heightened, colors and sounds blending into a psychedelic tapestry. He was on the ride, and there was no stopping now. Every bite, a calculated risk, every crunch, a siren's call to the abyss. But, as with all great highs, the threat of the crash loomed, the sugar's sharp edges threatening to tear him apart from the inside. The dance had begun, and Randy, a willing participant, swayed to its seductive rhythm, chasing the dragon that was Captain Crunch.
My daughter had her first sleepover and it was with a family that originated in India. They had spaghetti for breakfast. The idea that only certain foods are acceptable for breakfast is silly, and considering the bizarre history of cereal it's nice to see cereal in decline.
Edit: Regarding questioning tradition and rules- I remember reading a book called "Indians of the Oaks" and feeling pretty validated that the traditional diet of the aboriginal people of the San Diego region only had 2 meals a day, and they managed just fine.
When my sons were 5 and 7 I liked to do what we called "reverse day" once every few months, where they have dessert first in morning with dinner. Then lunch and breakfast at night. Quite a hit and helps think outside the box.
Certainly, I find I don't really need breakfast most days. I feel my best when I wake up, have a coffee (there's some oat milk in there so a few calories), get a swim in, and then have an early-ish lunch. If I eat breakfast I never feel right in the pool.
When you wake up your liver start converting stored glycogen and pumping out glucose so your fasting blood sugar is high enough to function. Your body is actually adapted for morning fasting.
Diabetics have to be aware of this and time their meds appropriately.
I had a conversation with my wife a few years back, about how a lot of things that are deemed acceptable or situationally appropriate are cultural. And sugared-breakfast-cereal vs real food came up.
My conclusion was, cereal is cheap and sugar is addictive. Better to take the time to eat a good non-processed-food breakfast.
Until many years ago, I had been obese for many years and I had been believing that nothing that I could do was able to change that, due to many previous failed attempts.
Then I have made a very detailed analysis of everything that I was eating and I have begun to weigh myself every day at the same hour and in the same conditions with high resolution scales, to be able to assess the effect of the changes in my diet.
After replacing the junk food that I was buying with food cooked at home from raw ingredients, after a year I have reduced my weight to two thirds of the initial weight and then I have kept it constant for the next two decades.
The worst offenders among the junk food that I had to completely eliminate from my daily intake, had been fruit juices and fruit yogurts and breakfast cereals, all of which contain excessive amounts of sugars, regardless of producer.
Now, instead of breakfast cereals, I eat at breakfast home-made bread (baked quickly in a microwave oven), made of pure wheat flour, without any additives.
I was a very obese guy in my early twenties and had never actually looked at the caloric content of what I was eating. Realizations like "the fries at in and out can be more caloric than the burger" blew my mind. Same for the tortilla being a huge percentage of the calories in a burrito. In Scott pilgrim Vs the world his exclamation of "bread makes you fat?!?!?" Was very relatable! Glad you found a system that works for you.
> cereal is cheap and sugar is addictive. Better to take the time to eat a good non-processed-food breakfast.
Cheap/easily available, tasty/desirable thanks to sugar, trivial&quick to make and eat when time is at a premium - that sounds perfect in general, doubly perfect when you're trying to ensure kids eat something relatively nutritious before school. I imagine that's why cereals stuck around - it's the "trick kids into drinking milk" plus energy booster for school children.
(Also, sure, it's "better to take the time to eat a good non-processed food breakfast", but most people have neither the time nor money for that.)
Traditional bread or a cereal porridge microwaved in a few minutes from pure unsweetened cereal seeds or flakes are more nutritious and much cheaper than breakfast cereals.
Unlike breakfast cereals, they do not contain sugars, but when eaten simultaneously with sweetened milk, there will be no noticeable taste difference. When you sweeten the milk yourself, the amount of added sugar is normally far smaller than the unbelievably high amounts typical for breakfast cereals.
They might also just have tried it, either then for first time or before and liked it, and not felt any reason not to have it at breakfast.
I have a similar story about mashed potato - they wanted to try it for whatever reason and so they did. Just a bowl of mashed potato, nothing else. The verdict was that it was pretty plain! (To make it worse, I would guess it was instant just-add-water stuff.)
Oh another one - in reverse, and about myself - I like to have bhel puri for breakfast sometimes. It's basically cereal^, but actually tastes nice. And I'll take chutneys over milk any day.
^bhel is literally sugar-free 'rice krispies' or whatever it's called, but I suppose rice isn't technically a cereal, but certainly a bowl of puffed rice with milk would be called '[breakfast] cereal'.
I’d have presumed it to be Kheer Vermicelli. It’s a very well known and loved sweet dish in India. My aunty often makes it as an addition to the morning meal when I go back to her village and stay with her.
This may or may not be related to that family, but when I grew up in Thailand, and my AC didn't work so I sweat my butt off at night, the first thing I wanted for breakfast was something salty. I can see spaghetti doing a good job filling that craving!
> The idea that only certain foods are acceptable for breakfast is silly, and considering the bizarre history of cereal it's nice to see cereal in decline.
I should add that this take is particularly absurd when talking about breakfast cereal, which is a relatively modern product and it's adoption was mainly due to marketing than actual health benefits, let alone traditional diets.
What health benefits? Sugar is incredibly addictive (I struggled with it for decades). Cereal companies know to use compelling marketing, add some fiber and niacin to claim it's "healthy" and enough people will get addicted.
Interestingly Mexico is leading in many ways to address it by prohibiting cartoons on sugary cereals (and more health warnings on labeling). Kelloggs has been fighting it in court.
As a person who has to prep breakfast, spaghetti is probably the easiest non-breakfast-typical meal to prep and that’s like 5 times more work to prep than toast + eggs + yogurt + bananas.
Though I did experience “breakfast is for dinners leftovers” in one family and that seems to work well when planned for
I mean the spaghetti takes 9 minutes to cook, right? Meanwhile a sunny side up egg is maybe 3 minutes?
I don’t have canned sauce (a me thing), I make it just by doing “olive oil in pan with garlic, then throw in some cut up tomatoes”. I really like this but it’s a thing. Pasta pot is of course bigger than a pan too.
But I’m more talking about the time commitment since mornings are usually “I want to eat ASAP”
And egg cleanup is one pan? Scrambled there’s a bowl but this is why God invented washing machines
Is it, though? For a start nobody wants to spend hours preparing breakfast. Second, I don't think anyone is ready for a rich, heavy meal in the morning. Third, it's ok for culture to be "just because". Culture and tradition is nice. That's why humans always develop it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it (doesn't apply to junk food for breakfast, which is broke, but porridge or muesli etc, go for it).
Sure, I just mean that if it feels broken for you, try something different! I never liked eating breakfast, and people get really weird about it ("It's the most important meal of the day! Your body will go in to starvation mode!" etc. etc.) with no basis in fact.
I haven't eaten breakfast regularly my entire adult life. People used to be funny about it but in more recent years people seem to have come around. I work with people who sit down all day and none of us need breakfast. It's more of a habit than anything. I do occasionally partake in breakfast when it's fun, though, like on holiday.
Agreed that what is “appropriate” for certain meals is pretty silly. A pet peeve of mine though is when people bring fragrant, dinner-smelling food to eat in the office (not the cafeteria area). It's kind of distracting. :p
When I was growing up, breakfast was very often just re-heated leftovers from a previous dinner. A full plate of meat & veg with some sort of gravy or sauce was the norm, not the exception.
Fortunately, as non-Italians we have the entire array of the world's cuisine available for us to enjoy as we like. Trying old favourites in new ways can be a joy.
I'm so glad other people are like this, though. I can't stand when someone says they're making a dish and I find all kinds of random ingredients in there. I don't know why and don't care to try to justify it. I'm just glad that there are people like Italians who are like me.
I never understood why Americans had so much breakfast cereal. It’s basically highly sweetened rolled corn. If you don’t eat it with milk you’re not get much nutrition at all.
Milk is extremely popular. I have it with my cereal in the morning. Also drink a glass of cold milk now and then, it gives you a filling sensation. My two year old has recently started drinking lots of it from a glass that he pours himself.
Sorry if I'm missing something here. Maybe it is just too obvious and doesn't need to be stated? Maybe. I don't know but I don't see how we can avoid the elephant in the room when we talk about cereals.
I'm talking about the total fertility rate and how people like me refuse to have any children because society refuses to pay us to have children.
I think millennials and younger people should continue to hold out and have fewer (preferably zero) children until we get a more favorable deal from society. Right now individual parents pay way too much of the cost to raise children. I think if we can lower TFR to about one or less for a decade or two, we can get a much better deal.
Back to the topic, I think it is worth asking if cereal consumption is down simply because we have fewer children eating cereal than before. Is that not possible? Do adults eat cereal every morning?
Ah, yes. Just like the thousands of generations of humanity who begat us, we should strike until our elders pay us to reproduce. Else, who is this "society" of which you write? Surely it's not those younger than us. So it must be us and our elders. And since we aren't going to pay ourselves to reproduce, I guess the bill then slides to our elders.
Perhaps this is the Great Filter–conscious species become so entitled, effete, and apathetic that they refuse to reproduce until they either fall back into the dark ages or go extinct.
I mean, yeah, the previous generation had it easier, and society provided them with a reality in which they could buy a home for a family on a single income, for example
Now, the same people are buying up multiple properties that the next generation would otherwise live in, so they can rent-seek instead of earning the money improving society.
Indeed, the previous generation claiming the current generation is "entitled" is a story as old and boring as time, but the ones now obliviously claiming it without realizing they had it better, pretending they were "roughing it" with their 1-income mortgages, are truly the most entitled of all.
I think it's perfectly possible to follow your comment 100% and still expect "payment" to happen. In what sense is it a problem for the "us" group if society is doomed because the "us" group gets the short end of the stick compared to the "elders" group? You seem to be calling the "us" group entitled, but that's a matter of perspective. The "elders" group can perfectly well be called entitled if they don't want to chip in for continued survival.
Sounds to me like "us" and "elders" should get round the table and figure out a way to make having children more palatable.
It's always weird reading HN with over inflated egos, and those on good salaries.
I've been in debt for over a decade. For some that money would be chicken feed, but for me it has ensured I'm in perpetual debt. I never have spending money. Wear clothes until they totally fall apart. Found a pair of shoes that I have repurposed. And sometimes have barely anything to eat for weeks. If I'm lucky I get to the pub once a year. Can't afford Christmas presents etc.
Then I read that Boris Johnson will struggle for a place to live when he retreats from being a prime minister where he struggles to live on his 200k salary. And in the following months earns 5 million for doing a a few speeches.
Some of us indeed can have nothing but never have to worry.
A billion dollars split evenly over the US population nets around $2.98 per person, so we're gonna need a lot to really make any appreciable difference.
> So it must be us and our elders. And since we aren't going to pay ourselves to reproduce, I guess the bill then slides to our elders.
I think it is pretty clear that employers must pay a fair wage.
If you work for a living but your income does not allow you to survive, let alone support kids, then your employer is failing to meet his end of the social contract.
It's entirely stupid how minimum wage simply does not cover the cost of existing, specially in times of record profits.
It's more like this: educated people don't have children for multiple reasons, because they can control their emotions enough to not succumb to them regarding the huge downsides of having them, because they are smart enough to have such existential questions that encourage nihilism and anti-natalism, and simply because they are better at using contraception.
Being smart has negative evolutionary pressure: natural selection selects for animals that do not question whether or not they should have children.
I'm getting some conservative vibes from the rhetoric about 'entitlement' and calling people overly feminine, as if the caricature we call 'manhood' has a real solution to today's issues. I don't know what to tell you, none of us asked to be here. When someone uses the entitlement angle, they try to push an idea that everyone deserves less than what is being proposed. What exactly is entitled about requiring stability before having children? If society cannot provide enough opportunity to sustain stability, then they have failed the people.
Society's not entitled to a working population, or a population at all. People are more than a means to an end, and if we have to burn down capitalism to prove it, I'll get my torch!
Otherwise, why should I have children? As a man, I stand only to lose from marriage and children. The legal and social atmosphere is all responsibility, no power or freedom.
I'm "conservative" and for the most part I agree. Another angle could be: most states have resorted to immigrarion to fix this and maybe encourage this. Perhaps that's the problem? A counterexample to my point would be Japan.
Paying you to have children seems a bit much, potentially creating dangerous incentives. On the other hand, figuring out a way for people to be better off and not think about it so much due to basic responsibility sounds way better. Of course, good luck to policymakers with that one.
Never mind being paid to have children. I'd just like to have the means to support a dog. It's bizarre to think that in a nation like the UK we'd struggle so much.
We have put off having kids and now have probably missed the fertility window, because we have never been financially in a position to support some. And it's a horrible pain for the pair of us.
The current trend is to financially punish people, particularly the poor, for their impact on the environment/climate.
By that logic, having kids should be brutally expensive, as it's the absolute worst thing you could do for the environment.
If we're seriously talking about 'degrowth' at this point, a managed decline of human economic activity, then population degrowth - significantly reduced breeding - should be the top priority?
>I think millennials and younger people should continue to hold out and have fewer (preferably zero) children until we get a more favorable deal from society.
Your gametes are accumulating mutations every year you get older. If you actually want kids at some point, and you're in a position to have them, then you should do it soon, for the sake of their health.
I think it's a combination of that, and the general lack of latchkey kids in general. Cereal was a completely safe thing for kids to prepare and eat themselves when you left for work before them, and got home after them. It's what we all ate every morning before school.
For a variety of reasons, such lifestyles seem way less common today.
I don't know, there's many people with dairy intolerance.
A bit off puffed grain draped in sugar with a sprinkle of vitamins, in a headache inducing substance doesn't sound like the best start for any kid.
But agree that it was a go to for me when getting back from school. But then again we starved ourselves to keep our dinner money when we were kids. And barely ate well at all. Pretty envious of those kids that had parents that cooked for them.
My second school had good food. If I had spent the money on a dinner I would have done much better than eating at home. My third school had crap food.
Envious looking back on those that had free school meals. This is in the UK. But this is years back, and I wouldn't be surprised if the quality of lunches has dwindled to nothing, or even if schools have canteens.
I visited a hospital a decade or so back, and it had a KFC on the concourse.
Disagree. Unless we can create incentives for everyone to abstain, the poor and third-world countries are going to continue to reproduce at the same rates. The distribution will only get more skewed, and the deal will only get worse.
Aside from all the sugar, carbs and being overpriced, consuming milk like that as an adult is just weird. Since I don't have kids, I only have a small carton for coffee and the occasional bechamel sauce or baking.
