The single biggest improvement I made to my diet (and life, in general) was giving up breakfast cereal. I used to eat a heaping bowl of the bad stuff every. single. morning. growing up (bad stuff = Lucky Charms, Frosted Flakes, Fruity Pebbles, etc.). I'd have it for dessert ("look mom, I'm not having ice cream, I'm having cereal! it's healthy!").
Then as I got older, I thought I was making an improvement by "upgrading" to something more wholesome -- like Frosted Mini Wheats ("It's shredded wheat.......and SUGAR.")
I finally rebooted my eating when I started running about 4 years ago and promptly lost 35+ lbs and actually became athletic for the first time in my life. I traded in the cereal and started having greek yogurt for breakfast (more recently I switched to having a _real_ breakfast in the morning -- eggs, grapefruit and steel-cut oats and feel even better).
But the point is: We've been marketed-at to the point where we just think that cereal is what you have for breakfast, and it feels great to wake up from that trance.
Wow, people really think that breakfast cereal is healthy, especially the sugary stuff you were eating? This might just be a US thing, because outside US I don't think it is considered healthy at all. And it has been that way for a long time.
Breakfast cereal is easy, and it has milk which is good for you, I thought that is why it is popular.
I think it's common in Europe for people to consider muesli healthy, even though many of the common brands are not really that healthy either. Depends on how much dried fruit and other such stuff you have in it (some varieties also have sugar or honey added). But it's true that I don't think anybody considers things closer to the Froot Loops end of the spectrum to be healthy.
Take that a step further: for virtually anything that comes in a box, the most important requirement is shelf life. That's why it comes in a box: long shelf life reduces logistical cost, which reduces the apparent cost of the product. Nutrition is whatever they can legally get away with.
Unfortunately this is the truth about just about the entire western food industry. I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against. Without some sort of government intervention, it's just too difficult to make healthy choices for most people to be successful. I feel like the food industry is in an arms race as to who can make the most addictive product possible.
The new Doritos Loaded product is a great example, it reminds me of a designer drug. I'm sure it is absolutely delicious, crafted specifically to incite pleasure in our brains, but processed to be faster to digest and give little nutrition so as to not fill us up so we stop eating.
Edit: As another point, prepare a meal of healthy food and see how much harder it is to overeat. Without the intensely pleasurable flavors that drive you to eat "until you hate yourself" as Lous CK would say, I find I enjoy the flavor until I am reasonably full and then don't want to pack anymore food down because it just doesn't taste good enough too.
After breaking the cycle of fake food, the body's satiety signals are surprisingly effective at calorie/portion control. It does makes more sense to model something like Doritos Loaded as an addictive drug rather than a foodstuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
> the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against.
I don't think it's primarily consumers that would fight against this; rather, the food industry will. At the moment, not only do we not "sin tax" sugar the way we do tobacco, we actually subsidize artificially cheap corn starch and syrup. And unfortunately, eliminating these subsidies is a complete political non-starter.
Do you think that any "treat" that is unhealthy should be considered an addictive drug rather than a foodstuff? Everyone I know, regardless of how health-conscious they are, will at least occasionally partake in some candy, or fried food, or chips, etc. even if it's very rare. Personally, I don't think that's a big deal.
It's not a big deal to enjoy junk food sparingly. The problem is these foods are made to be addictive and the data suggests that more and more people are crossing that health boundary. Just look up global obesity trends - it's not just a "'Murican" problem anymore. Food addiction is real, and ask any addict how hard it is to stay on the wagon when their drug of choice is constantly shoved in front of their face.
"Personally, I don't think that's a big deal."
You may live a healthy life so out of sight out of mind, but the obesity epidemic is a huge issue (no pun intended) in regards to quality of life, healthcare costs, etc.
You're completely correct; however, the occasional partaking you describe is equally applicable to other addictive activities, be they substances like alcohol or marijuana, or purely behavioral addictions like gambling or MMOs. Some people can do it once in a blue moon, some people can sustain doing it every weekend, and for some people it becomes an unhealthy dependency.
In all cases, I don't think there's anybody who wouldn't benefit from additional mindfulness. If such behavior becomes problematic, it's a case-by-case determination as to whether moderation or elimination is the better strategy. (I personally find it easier to eat zero junk food than to eat it occasionally, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone who can moderate successfully.)
I agree that it's hard to make healthy choices, but I think it's a bit more complex than that...
I packed on an extra 20-30 pounds working in a catered, snack-heavy silicon valley company. I decided to change my diet completely. I slowly cut out all processed food from my diet, and then all snacks, so that everything that I ate was homemade by myself, typically "healthy" (similar to mediterranean diet), with no sugar, no juice, lots of vegetables and fish, some fruit, and relatively portion-controlled (eyeballed.) I lost 8 pounds but then plateau-ed - I continued to be overweight. I also exercised 4 times a week.
I started monitoring calories for a couple months and realized I was eating at a slight "calorie deficit" - I should have been losing a pound every week or two but I wasn't. Only when I cut my calories and STRICTLY portion-controlled my healthy food (to a calorie deficit where I should have been losing 2-3 pounds a week), did I finally start losing 2/3 pound a week. I'm proud to say I'm now a healthy weight but I eat FAR less and exercise FAR more than I should "need" to.
The journey really helped me realize there's something wrong with our food (not just the processed food but the ingredients themselves) and that there are some environmental factors involved (something in the water? the environment? pesticides? I really don't know. I'm not sure what it is.)
Did you actually get your base metabolic rate measured? I'm curious why you think you were eating at a calorie deficit.
I control my calorie intake using published calorie counts (for mass market stuff), and a kitchen scale for anything I make myself. I also record every single thing in a diary. I eat a lot of crap (breakfast is either a hot dog or a bag of mustard pretzel bits), but my weight loss is exactly what I'd expect given my measured calorie deficit. If anything, its easier to measure your calorie consumption if you don't cook at home, because many mass market places now publish nutrition info, and they have a strong commercial incentive to maintain uniform portion sizes.
No I didn't get my metabolic rate measured. I was using estimates based on my height and weight, which told me I should be burning X calories a day. I used the low end of the range (despite exercising I didn't count myself as active for getting that estimate.) I'm very curious though about measuring my official metabolic rate. Do you know where I could get it done in the bay area?
I did the same as you in terms of measuring calories, but mostly using scales or calorie counts on packets as I was cooking using raw ingredients. I recorded everything in a diary, using paper initially and then myfitnesspal app. I would also "cross-check" (e.g., after finishing a bottle of olive oil I'd look back at how much I'd logged.) I do think there's space for error and variation - e.g., a vegetable that's sweeter than average, or trying to judge how much fat (and therefore calories) is left on a piece of meat. That last one is the toughest because it can make a huge difference.
I hear this from many people, and experienced it myself, lose weight to a certain point, then level out. My theory: when you are over weight, you burn more calories just doing daily activities. As the weight comes off, your normal movements burn fewer calories. I guess a way to test this is once you plateau, start wearing a 30 pound weight around your waist. Then see if that makes you plateau at 30 pounds lighter.
Gosh that sounds like an excellent weight loss product if you could make some sort of weighted undergarment that didn't make the wearer look frumpy (assuming it actually works of course). The problem would be that people would get used to the amount of calories they burn while wearing the product, and would probably balloon up as soon as the stopped wearing it.
Well, you probably used a calorie budget based on a few simple statistics like your sex, height, and weight. With individual differences is metabolic rates, it's very possible that your "slight calorie deficit" was actually breaking even for your individual calorie usage. Just as likely is that the nutrition info on labels is imprecise or even systematically inaccurate. For example, I believe there are penalties if your box says it contains 1 pound and it actually contains less, but there's no penalty for putting in more, since only in the former case is the consumer getting shortchanged, and this asymmetry probably creates an incentive for systematic underestimation of net weights, and therefore underestimation of calories per food package.
Probably some combination of these factors explains why you need to "ear FAR less than you should need to" based on how the math works out. I still think counting calories can be useful, but only in relative terms, not absolute.
American food is crap. I don't know what they add in the US, but a lot of stuff seems artificial. Even the milk seems over-processed. Source: European who had 2 trips to the US, in supposedly healthy states: California, Washington.
I feel more like American milk is extremely homogenized, so all milk tastes exactly the same. However, I really enjoy the taste of it, so I haven't had any problem so far.
In contrast, Indian milk tastes different when you buy from different vendors. You also have a choice between cow and buffalo milk.
Have you ever tasted natural milk? Non pasteurized? I mean either completely raw or just boiled once straight after it's been collected? I have. The taste of European milk is similar. That of American milk is almost nothing like real cow milk.
As a Greek, I can safely say you don't know what you're talking about. My favorite foods are beans, lentils, peas, etc. I will happily eat them until I burst, and they aren't processed at all and don't contain much more than salt/pepper/oil/tomato. They are delicious.
It's not an appeal to authority (Greeks aren't dietary authorities), it's "Greeks have very tasty food that's also non-processed, hence I can say you don't know what you're talking about".
"Without the intensely pleasurable flavors that drive you"
Try to get fat eating steak or carrots. More or less on a dare I found I started feeling sick after the second pound of steak couldn't finish the third, and a daily diet of that doesn't contain enough calories to fatten me, only 1500 for two. Ditto the carrots, I've done the "orange skin" thing on a dare (so I'm an idiot, whatever) but again its literally not enough calories to fatten me and my stomach feels really sick after maybe two pounds of carrots. Maybe the fundamental problem is my stomach only holds two pounds of solid food, and two pounds of healthy food can't fatten you up, but two pounds of junk food most certainly can.
The caloric density of junk food really is incredible. There's this restaurant I use to like to eat at that served these honey biscuits before every meal. I used to eat ~4 of them every time I went since they were pretty small. Then I found out each one was 200 calories! So I was pounding down 800 calories BEFORE eating a large burger with mashed potatoes on the side. I don't do that anymore but come on I would have never assumed I was eating that many calories worth of biscuits. The entire meal was probably ~1800 calories or more!
There is also a velocity contribution where after 800 calories of carrots I wouldn't feel like immediately eating another meal, but as you wrote 800 calories of pastries is just an appetizer.
The problem with donuts is not necessarily that they're a huge number of empty calories, but that I can eat perhaps two per hour all day long and wash them down with a can of Mt Dew and never feel full and still feel hungry for dinner in an hour.
I don't think I ate for about 24 hours after I ate two pounds of grilled steak. Just wasn't hungry. Couldn't eat another bite and didn't feel like more food for a day. Don't think I could have pulled that off with honey biscuits, I'd be ravenous again by the next meal time.
This whole topic fits in with the stereotype of "ate Chinese-American style take out, got hungry again in two hours" That stuffs actually pretty good food, other than added corn syrup and the lack of long term satiety resulting in eating more.
I mostly eat paleo-type food but I'll socialize and eat junk food occasionally, and it never fails to amaze me that I'll have a piece of cake and feel like I'm starving even though its more calories than my entire salad lunch or a medium sized bag of pecans.
What you are describing is my love/hate relationship with sushi. It's just so delicious, but it's outrageously expensive considering I usually eat sushi until I am stuffed yet I'm already hungry again by the time I get home.
I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against
People rightfully should fight against that heavy regulation. You don't want to go down that road. Whatever unhealthy dietary choices that people are making is a much better alternative to government regulating people's diet. Think about it for a while.
Regulation is the reason you can buy food and feel safe that it won't poison you. It's why you can buy a house and feel safe that the ceiling won't collapse on top of you. It's why you can visit a cinema and feel safe that there are enough fire exits and alarms and a sensible evacuation plan.
All of these regulations aren't in place just because officious bureaucrats wanted to clog up the smooth workings of a free, capitalist society, they exist because historically, when they weren't, people died. For proof, go and read about some of the nightclub and theatre fires that happened a hundred years ago, in which hundreds of people burned to death.
When there's a immediate link between malfeasance and harm, it's easy to see that the government should step in, introducing building codes and hygiene standards to ensure it can't happen again. When the harm is delayed, the link feels more tenuous, even if it's really not. Companies that pollute are contributing to potentially catastrophic disruption of the biosphere and global warming, but it doesn't happen overnight, so people treat it as less wrong than building a nightclub with no fire exits. It isn't.
Likewise, food companies who aggressively promote nutritionally dangerous foodstuffs cereals at children, while promoting them as healthy, are doing harm. They're doing it knowingly, and they're paying to distort scientific and political processes in order to keep doing it.
It's easy to trumpet individual choice as all important, but reality is not an individualist pipe dream. The average person is not well informed about dietary science and never will be, and many children cannot make a choice at all, let alone an informed one. In the face of the wealth and marketing power of large food companies, people have no chance on their own, and they levels of obesity in modern societies are clear proof of that.
Food regulation isn't about the government telling people what they can eat. It's about the government telling food companies that they can't produce food that's dangerous, in the long term as well as the short term. Just like the government tells companies they can't produce cars that fly apart on the highway, or buildings that fall down in a strong wind.
Regulation of dangerous business practices is exactly what government should be doing it. It's the reason why all the other nonsense governments do is worth putting up with. It protects people from irresponsible companies, and it protects responsible companies from being undercut by irresponsible companies.
It's going in the wrong direction. Instead of empowering people to make good decisions, you're advocating putting a government gun to the heads of people to make them make healthy choices.
So are you going to throw more people in prison for the illegal sugar trade?
It never ceases amaze me how many people on HN actually advocate these draconian, statist policies. Stop hating on your fellow man.
No, I'll repeat what I already said: You don't regulate what people can eat, you regulate what food companies can sell. You don't allow them to sell dangerous food. That isn't draconian statism, it's sensible regulation.
So, basically you're suggesting massive scale nanny-statism. Do we really want a world where government can tell us what to eat and not to eat, what we can smoke and not smoke (etc)?
What if instead of being reactionary and waging another war (War on Drugs, War on This, War on That), we step back and think about what caused this phenomenon in the first place.
Cereal, junk food, cheap low-quality meat all point towards the same culprit: farm subsidies - esp. corn and soybeans. It's time we phase them out and start eating real food again.
There are things that regulation can do that go counter to what the market want.
Forbidding snack and soda vending machines in schools, mandating healthy and balanced meals in school's cafeterias, making it mandatory for kids to receive an education on food that allows them to understand their choices, ...
There doesn't need to be a lot of regulation. At least just enough to protect and educate kids to become better informed adults.
They'll be replaced by crop insurance. Different math; same result. Anyway the solution to diet isn't to fool with the supply; its to change folk's ideas about food.
I have a feeling the only thing that will stop the obesity epidemic is heavy food regulation which people will fight tooth and nail against.
I suspect that all it's needed is preventing the huge load of disinformation that we suffer.
Most people that I've known that were trying to lose weight (and failing) were totally clueless, parroting cliches from tv.
Then, maybe forbid (or even better, criminalize :-) adding any kind of sugar to packaged food or to meals where it doesn't make sense. Tax heavily sugar.
Such intensely pleasurably flavored foods are actually useful for a minority who are underweight, feel full before they really get the necessary amount of energy (just have to keep an eye on nutrients, though, as such foods are lower on them), and have to "overeat" to not starve themselves.
Being underweight is not a reason to eat sugar. There's simply nothing good in it. Instead drink cream, eat potatoes, oats and other things with lots of healthy calories.
Obviously, foods are not only about energy supply. One needs all sorts of nutrients, so just eating lots of Doritos is a terrible idea.
Maybe I'm wrong on this, but isn't every calorie source fairly acceptable if one hadn't got enough yet, and they're still far from a limit on how many one should get? I.e. a slice of pizza isn't "healthy" (nutritionally dense) but brings more good (+200-300 Kcal, and some protein from cheese and meat, and possibly some vitamins from vegetables if topping contains fresh ones) than bad (possible excess supply of triglycerides and some gastritis risk) if one had only consumed 1500 Kcal today and they really should get at least 2500. Especially if one has to force themselves to eat oatmeal, but would happily eat some tasty "junk food".
Bottom line.. we're killing ourselves with overloading our bodies with carbohydrates. Nearly every bit of nutritional advice handed out by the government since the 70s is a pack of lies made in concert with the subsidized corn and wheat industries.
These industries sell you poison, then the pills that slow down how fast the poison kills you and tell you it's okay to keep eating it. Then the prescribing doctor gets kick backs.
Diabetics take note. How does continuing to eat the thing that got you there to begin with make any sense? Complete and utter lifestyle change.
Eat as many eggs as you want. Ignore EVERYTHING a doctor tells you about cholesterol. Eat a ton of vegetables and as much grass fed meat and butter as you can afford.
Your advice is incredibly dangerous and somewhat counterintuitive. Do not ignore everything a doctor tells you. Do your own research and understand that nutrition science is still in its infancy.
>Ignore EVERYTHING a doctor tells you about cholesterol.
Except for triglycerides. Triglycerides are extremely dangerous and strongly correlated to arteriosclerosis. There's evidence that triglycerides are formed in the liver when it's forced to process fructose.[1] They're also implicated in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.[2]
Don't ignore your doctor telling you about bad numbers, but take his/her advice as to what to do about it with a few grains of salt. Dietary cholesterol intake has little to do with the cholesterol in your blood. [3]
>Diabetics take note.
I agree with your basic premise that reducing carbohydrate intake can help with various metabolic diseases, but people with Diabetes need to be EXTREMELY careful. Often they've been on pills and injected insulin for such a long time that their body has adjusted and simply stopping the treatment could actually kill them. These individuals have an extremely dysfunctional carbohydrate metabolism and the transition to a low-carbohydrate metabolism is often accompanied by fatigue often called Keto Flu. [4] This kind of benign fatigue mimics dangerous hyper and hypoglycemic events that can require medical attention.
Diabetes can be treated by a low-carbohydrate diet, but the transition off medication needs to be supervised by a medical professional familiar with the practice.
Re. Diabetes, I think in some cases restricting carbs can be fatal as diabetics can suffer from ketoacidosis, where the blood turns acidic due to an uncontrollable amount of ketones present.
Also, if blood sugar drops too low, hypoglycaemia is a very real and potentially fatal threat.
In this case, a keto diet high in fat may not be ideal - an emphasis on low-GI carbs wound be safer. Perhaps it may be possible to ease into a keto diet slowly but the amount of time and monitoring may be a bit much to bare.
To prevent diabetes, keto all the way but it's a little bit tricky if you're already there and have been for some time.
> Diabetes, I think in some cases restricting carbs can be fatal as diabetics can suffer from ketoacidosis, where the blood turns acidic due to an uncontrollable amount of ketones present.
Ketoacidosis is extremely dangerous for diabetics, but it occurs in cases of extreme high blood sugar, not low blood sugar. These ketones can lead to serious kidney damage, or even kidney failure. Your point about hypoglycemia is dead on though.
As a type I diabetic myself, carbs are actually life saving during a low blood sugar episode (and low blood sugars actually occur more often for type I diabetics with tight control). As an aside, I find it perpetually frustrating how keto-fans like the OP conflate type I and type II diabetes as if there is no difference (because the answer to everything is "keto" \s).
Oh thanks for clarifying that. It's about lack of insulin, not too low blood sugar, in which case the blood sugar levels will be high, because the body has no insulin to use glucose as fuel. This is what causes the build up dangerous levels of ketones. I understand now.
If you're referring to me as the OP, I neither mentioned the keto diet nor am a fan of it per se. I did not distinguish between insulin dependent or not, so I apologize for that.
Sorry, I was certainly exaggerating here. I'm a little upset having dealt with these issues in the past in my family.
You sound like you know what you're talking about so I think we can agree that the way cholesterols are 'generally' discussed is misleading.
Also, transitioning off diabetes medicines is indeed tricky and I'll certainly be reading your linked articles - my father is starting a low carb diet and more or less already self regulates his medication for type ii diabetes.
> Nearly every bit of nutritional advice handed out by the government since the 70s is a pack of lies made in concert with the subsidized corn and wheat industries.
One of the more interesting things to come from the Soylent people, their self-experimentation, and the experimentation of their early adopters is a validation of an awful lot of the conventional wisdom regarding diet. When people stray too far in one direction or another from the RDI for a given factor, they often experience perceptible negative effects.
"Carbohydrates" are not the problem, highly processed industrial food, especially refined sugar, is. Eat some "carbohydrates" (rice, pasta, bread that was not made in a factory), but skip on the sugar.
Not necessarily, sweet potatoes are OK for people with diabetes to eat but one of the worst things a person with diabetes can eat, other than raw white sugar, is a banana.
Both sides of my skinny family have diabetes, not everyone but most, it's frustrating to see Internet know-it-alls wave their hands and declare they know why everyone is fat.
My family eats in-season foods, lots of seafood, vegetables from gardens they grow, is very active yet diabetes runs in the family on both sides. They eat such variety way more than I do which makes me worry considering my family history.
An aunt who was rail thin and very active died of pancreatic cancer, most of her siblings died from diabetic related illnesses.
What's worse is once diabetes (and old age) takes hold, it makes it hard to lose weight and people scorn with vitriolic sneering they know why so and so has diabetes. Look at reddit subreddit fatlogic to see a sea of sneering know-it-alls to see how common it is now it's like a new sport.
> What's worse is once diabetes (and old age) takes hold, it makes it hard to lose weight and people scorn with vitriolic sneering they know why so and so has diabetes.
I'm really glad you mentioned this. There's a lot more to weight loss then meets the eye. Your body actively works against you if you're not smart about meeting its needs, and knowing what is real hunger and what is a sugar craving takes a higher level of self-awareness then a lot of people think is necessary. Insulin is a hell of a hormone - your consciousness finds any excuse to raise that blood sugar when it gets too low. Makes you question free will sometimes :)
When the established medical practice is to inject people with MORE insulin when their body has produced so much it has become insensitive to it, there's gotta be something wrong. I don't think we've even scratched the surface when it comes to treating metabolic disorders.
I don't think anyone has ever really, seriously believed that white bread was healthy, have they? Or sweet potatoes, just listen to the name of that. Just go back 70 years and you'll find everyone eating plain potatoes and much less sugary cereals than wheat, simply because they were cheaper. Cereals such as Rye and Oat.
Don't blame the doctors. No one ever recommended sweet potatoes over real potatoes. People made that choice against the recommendations of their grand parents and figured 'they would be alright'.
Yes it was. Do what works for your body. I wrote that a bit out of frustration dealing with doctors recently. But frankly minus the hyperbole, nutritional advice from doctors ain't great.
Grass fed or not, regular red meat consumption isn't good for us.
There is a good body of evidence that that people from Europe do well on the Mediterranean diet. That diet is mostly plant based but with oily fish and occasional eggs and dairy.
Where's your evidence that grass-fed beef isn't good for us?
If you're saying eating red meat 7 times a week is bad, that's obvious, but I've seen no studies that say that grass-fed beef 1-2 days a week would be bad for you.
Cholesterol levels are only somewhat correlated to diet. You can have a normal weight, eat right and exercise and still have a high enough cholesterol number to increase your risk of heart disease.
The irony is that we now (finally!) know that cholesterol is actually super important for us, so important that body manufactures it itself and there is no correlation between cholesterol-rich food and the actual cholesterol level in blood. Body uses it to patch veins when cracks or another damage appears there. So take statins, and you might end up with internal bleeding instead...
It seems the main epidemic is long-term inflammation, causing many civilization illnesses. Sugar is one of the most inflammatory foods as well, as most simple carbohydrates.
This! And deep inside everyone already knows this, they just try to convince themselves that other options 'can be healthy too'.
Look at this, per 100g, the "Kashi 7 Whole Grain Cereals, Puffs" mentioned in this thread has 5-10g of protein and less than 5g of fibre [1]. The top cereal when googling healthy cereals [2] has 2g of protein and 5g of fibre. In comparison plain nice, big oats have 13g of protein and 10g of fibre. There's just no beating it.
Just pulled some own brand 'porridge oats' out of the cupboard. Bought from Waitrose here in the UK. per 100g: 10.8g fibre, 56g carbohydrate, 1g 'of which sugars', 12.1g protein. Ingredients described as 'Wholegrain oatflakes (100%)'.
In Australia (which surely can't be that different to the UK), porridge is oats cooked in boiling water for 10 minutes until it becomes a thick slurry. Then a small amount of cold milk is poured around the rim of the bowl and some sugar is sprinkled on top.
Porridge is actually described in the article as the good old british cereal. (Search the article for 'oat').
Though, porridge oats are usually smaller and more processed than oats for eating cold.
Try this: Go to your favorite grocery store and look for Kashi 7 Whole Grain Puffs, what we used to call Puffed Kashi.
This is the original product from the Kashi company: Whole hard red wheat, whole brown rice, whole oats, whole barley, whole triticale, whole rye, whole buckwheat, sesame seeds, and nothing else. Puffed, but just barely puffed so it's still chewy and crunchy. Great stuff.
So try to find it. Your grocer will probably have over a dozen varieties of Kashi cereals, every one of them sugared up concoctions. But they are very unlikely to have the original Puffed Kashi, the real thing.
Trader Joe's used to have it. Whole Foods used to have it. Safeway used to have it. Now they all just have Kashi's sugared products.
But lucky me, I found one place that still has the real Puffed Kashi: Amazon!
You feed mammals grains and processed grains if you want to fatten them up as fast as possible for the slaughter while they're in the feedlot, if you don't care how long they live, cause a couple years is long enough.
Or according to TV commercials you feed grains to little mammals of your species because you love them and they're cute. Even though it'll fatten them up and kill em.
You can try and deny what biological commonalities exist for whatever reasons, but the weight scale knows better.
Feeding people the same stuff that farmers use to fatten their herds will inevitably make people look like people of walmart website. No avoiding it.
My wife and I gave up eating breakfast cereal years ago because we did not feel as good in the morning compared to eating fruit, eggs, perhaps a veggie omelette, etc.
Everyone is different so if I may suggest: try doing some A/B testing: go a month eating cereal and then go a month not eating cereal and see how differntly you feel. For all I know, some people may thrive on cereal, but not my wife and I.
Speaking of cat food, 1/3 of pet foods contain brewers rice which has little or no nutritional value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brewers_rice
For cats being completely carnivorous, I can't imagine carbs are doing them any favors.
Do they still have a shot in cereal commercials where the announcer says "part of this complete breakfast" while the screen flashes a place setting with a small bowl of cereal, eggs, toast, half a grapefruit, orange juice, and milk?
I remember thinking that breakfast would be just as "complete" if you left out the cereal.
I used to live near a Kellog's factory. It was a really scary looking gigantic building, looking like a big machine from hell with steam pouring out of it. It was a really scary thought to imagine how they make cornflakes there.
I never was much into prepackaged cereals, but that totally put me off.
Milk is sugar water and fat. Breakfast cereals are mostly sugars and starches with a bit of fiber. Add them together and you have a recipe for crashing halfway between breakfast and lunch.
Do we really need yet another essay on the perils of processed foods?
Just look at the ingredients on most breakfast cereals and you'll see sugar or some kind of sugar substitute as the second or third ingredient. Eat real food if you're at all interested in your health.
Sugar is a real food. Rice is >70% sugar and so are most potatoes.
Why fear 50g of cereal when you eat it with 200+g of milk, which is about the most perfect food available?
Sugar is the preferred energy of almost every cell in our bodies; and in the end, protein & fat will be converted into glucose if no sugar (glycogen) is available.
And sugar is "easy energy" and will make you fat. There are better sugar types (such as fructose (sugar from fruit) and Dextrose (found in the pharmacy))
All non-fibre carbohydrates are metabolized as sugar, and it's VERY rare for our bodies to convert carbs into fat. All complex sugars are broken down into monosaccharides before absorption. Chew on a piece of bread for a couple minutes and enzymes in your saliva will break it down into glucose, and it will become sweet in your mouth.
Dextrose is glucose, and sugar does not directly make you fat. Eating a sustained caloric surplus makes you fat, no matter the macronutrient composition of your diet.
Even with alcohol, it's the indirect mechanism of storing consumed fat when consuming ethanol-energy rather than turning the ethanol into fat. Ethanol is a VERY poor fat precursor. Converting ethanol to lipids is an extremely inefficient process; when it happens only a few % of ethanol-calories end up being converted into fat-calories.
Through a similar mechanism to alcohol, one can start up DNL much faster with large acute fructose consumption, but even in that "worst case scenario" we still only convert about 1% of surplus fructose into fat - http://www.nutritionandmetabolism.com/content/9/1/89
Somewhat ironically, a scenario where we make more fat from the carbs & protein we eat is when we consume very little fat. Eat less than 10% fat in your diet and this will cause DNL to ramp up. This is explained more in the "how we get fat" link in my previous comment.
Oops, sorry, I didn't state my case properly, I wasn't suggesting alcohol is converted into fat (which I've been taught is exactly zero- the body treats it as a toxin and it gains priority on using it - but I guess a small percent or fraction of a percent is small enough that zero is an approximation), but that glucose can be stored as fat in the presence of alcohol. Drink a beer and eat some bread and it's likely some or most of those calories will be stored as fat. Even the carbohydrates. Also carbohydrates in the beer (though not the alcohol).
Your last point was the main gist of my post, though I didn't spell it out so well. I didn't realize that about fructose though.
"MythBusters" is an unscientific television show run by stunt men. Imagine someone holding a candle underneath a gas tank for five seconds, not exploding, and concluding with cheesy sound effects that the flammability of gasoline is a "Myth". That's "MythBusters".
"That aside, I've yet to see a conclusion on that show that wasn't reasonable."
Whenever the myth is about a secret project to such-and-such, they regularly use "we couldn't figure out how to do it" to conclude "it can't be done"; that isn't reasonable.
Then as I got older, I thought I was making an improvement by "upgrading" to something more wholesome -- like Frosted Mini Wheats ("It's shredded wheat.......and SUGAR.")
I finally rebooted my eating when I started running about 4 years ago and promptly lost 35+ lbs and actually became athletic for the first time in my life. I traded in the cereal and started having greek yogurt for breakfast (more recently I switched to having a _real_ breakfast in the morning -- eggs, grapefruit and steel-cut oats and feel even better).
But the point is: We've been marketed-at to the point where we just think that cereal is what you have for breakfast, and it feels great to wake up from that trance.