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.
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.
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…
"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?
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?
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)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
"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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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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.
(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?
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?
Of course you can "speed up" the process by blending them into a smoothie.
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.
Oatmeal is nutritionally identical to cereal for the obvious reason that that's what it is.
Here's the nutrition sidebar for Quaker Oats rolled oats versus Cheerios:
And even 1g per 40g is double 2g per 40g, not 'nutritionally identical'.
Here's Shredded Wheat: https://www.postshreddedwheat.com/products/the-original/
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.
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 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).
[0] https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/steel_cut_oats_are_a_nutrient_...
[1] https://www.nutritionletter.tufts.edu/ask-experts/q-before-c...
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.
[1] https://www.nestle-cereals.com/uk/brands/cheerios
† 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.
Might explain some of the confusion in this thread.
The more healthy products are marked with a green mark. None of the usual brand has it because of high sugar (or sugar like) substances contained.
https://www.sundhedsplejersken.nu/familien/kostanbefalinger/... .. in Danish so you might want to Google translate.
Right, its within the space of breakfast cereal, not an alternative to it.
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.
That's still "oatmeal". "Oat meal" would be a slightly odder way to say oat flour.
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.
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.
Umm... what's stopping you from chewing them yourself?
Why not blend/mince the food if it's a digestion issue
Does orange juice also cause issues?
Can you please explain this? I was following along nicely until this part.
I enlist yeast and bacteria to pre-chew some of my food, namely in sauerkraut/kimchi. Cooking also is a form of pre-chewing.
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!
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.
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.
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 imagine it's still better for you than a vat of Rice Krispies with milk and sugar but that's a low bar.
Bananas in particular are pretty high in sugar, and other than potassium their nutrient density is nothing special.
Also, their nutrient density is perfectly fine. It’s high in fiber, potassium, vitamin C, and vitamin B6.
Weird name to use; even if you want something biblical, there are probably less offputting references to bread.
if you take a vitamin pill, make sure it's bioavailable, ideally using EDTA, or some other polydentate ligand.
I will treat myself to a bowl of Lucky Charms every once in a while, though.
What was the obesity rate in 1993 vs. 2023?
Looking in my stock cupboard, the raw fats I do get are probably the best bang for the buck nutritionally.
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.
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.)
The state of HN on nutrition discourse is completely screwed.
Dietary cholesterol not an issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6024687/
Decent Summary of our current understanding of the health effects of different kinds of fats: https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-truth-abo...
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?
Here’s a good roundup of the research: https://www.the-nutrivore.com/post/a-comprehensive-rebuttal-...
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.
Canola is primarily monounsaturated.
> Saturated fat is essential for health.
Saturated fat is literally not essential.
> Cholesterol is nutritious
> All of that bullshit advice against saturated fat and dietary cholesterol has been completely debunked many years ago. It was fraudulent science.
You're spouting dangerous, pseudoscientific nonsense.
It is 35% polyunsaturated and whatever monounsaturated fat it contains is inferior quality for human needs. Rancid toxic trash.
> You're spouting dangerous, pseudoscientific nonsense.
You're a boomer living 50 years in the past with outdated fraudulent industry "research".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/317118
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.
But, yes, sugar is more consistently a problem than fat.
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 also don’t think he meant every day
Nice work! You gotta do what works for you and I'm glad you've found a system that works for you. Keep it up!
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.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/egg-mcmuffin.html
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> The wealthiest 1% of Americans controlled about $41.52 trillion in the first quarter, according to Federal Reserve data released Monday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent...
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.
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.
Sounds to me like "us" and "elders" should get round the table and figure out a way to make having children more palatable.
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.
Being smart has negative evolutionary pressure: natural selection selects for animals that do not question whether or not they should have children.
http://www.art.net/studios/hackers/hopkins/Don/text/rms-vs-d...
The poor countries will reach the same when they develop.
If we reach 1/10th the size of the current population, then we can start to wonder about fertility rate if it drops further.
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.
For a variety of reasons, such lifestyles seem way less common today.
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.
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?
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.
If you see it as a financial transaction, it’s probably better to not have children.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_cracker
So the profitable sector is feeding fat people?
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.
I know a lot of D1 football players not only eat cereal for breakfast but also as a late night snack.
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.
https://www.dietandfitnesstoday.com/glycemicIndexDetails.php...
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.
In other words, it depends on the person. :)
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.
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).
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?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj6S1tmSVmc
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Indians-oaks-Mellicent-Humason-Lee/dp...
Though I did experience “breakfast is for dinners leftovers” in one family and that seems to work well when planned for
Just takes one pot and a few minutes, some pesto and done. Cleaning up after making eggs is more work than the entire spaghetti dish.
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
Ultimately everyone has their own rhythm though
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.
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.
https://www.bakeryandsnacks.com/Article/2022/01/18/Mexico-we...
Also "low-rent"? Now apparently you have taken to mocking the poor
Diabetics have to be aware of this and time their meds appropriately.
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'.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/32042/corn-flakes-were-i...
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Example: https://www.uncletobys.com.au/products/cereals/uncle-tobys-v...
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.
No. They might be 3% sugars, but near entirety of corn flake is carbohydrates
For comparison, 100g of apples has an average of 10.4g of sugar: https://www.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/usda/apples?por..., and something like fruit loops is 30g of sugar per 100g (https://smartlabel.kelloggs.com/en_US/Product/Index/00038000...)
I see the typical American quest to eradicate (fats, then cholesterol, and now sugar) annoying.
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!
Milk also contains slow-ish sugars, not refined sugar.
Can you explain that?
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.
As in... eating normal sized breakfast ? Ain't nobody bothering to get the milk out of the fridge for 250 calories breakfast.
It looks like marketing move to look better tbh
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'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 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
A good carne asada burrito works too for that job.