Why cereal is not good for you

With the plethora of cold cereals on the market, vegan ones included, how can you find the healthiest ones? You already know the most important criteria, namely that the cereal be whole grain.

Eat it as a snack in place of foods like salty chips and crackers. Check that grains are listed first on the ingredient list. Searching for the Whole Grain Stamp by the Whole Grain Council is a good way to verify that the cereal is whole grain. Opt for ones with sprouted grains, as sprouting can increase nutrients and their bioavailability, Flanagan adds.

While Hubert recommends looking for one with two to four grams per serving, Flanagan says it should provide at least five grams of fiber per serving.

Notably, most of this sugar comes from processed foods — and breakfast cereals are among the most popular processed foods that are high in added sugars. Starting the day with a high-sugar breakfast cereal will spike your blood sugar and insulin levels. A few hours later, your blood sugar may crash, and your body will crave another high-carb meal or snack — potentially creating a vicious cycle of overeating 5. Excess consumption of sugar may also increase your risk of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancer 6 , 7 , 8.

Most breakfast cereals are loaded with sugar and refined grains. High sugar consumption is harmful and may increase your risk of several diseases. However, studies show that these health claims are an effective way to mislead people into believing that these products are healthier 9 , Breakfast cereals often have misleading health claims printed on the box — yet are filled with sugar and refined grains.

This also affects taste preferences. Studies show that some children prefer the taste of foods that have popular cartoon characters on the packaging 11 , Exposure to food marketing is even considered a risk factor for childhood obesity and other diet-related diseases While the colors and cartoons make the products more appealing to children, the health claims make the parents feel better about buying such products for their kids.

Cereal manufacturers are experts at marketing — especially toward children. If you choose to eat cereal for breakfast, here are some tips to help you select a healthier option. Try to choose a breakfast cereal with under 5 grams of sugar per serving. Read the food label to find out how much sugar the product contains. Breakfast cereals that pack at least 3 grams of fiber per serving are optimal. Eating enough fiber can have numerous health benefits Breakfast cereals tend to be crunchy and tasty, and it can be very easy to consume a high number of calories.

Ignore the health claims on the front of the box, making sure to check the ingredients list. What are the three C's? They're crunch, crisps, and clusters. This trio is code for clumps of rice, oats, or corn held together by sugar and fat. That even goes for bran cereals like this one from Kellogg's. It's time to end Raisin Bran cereals' long-held reputation for being healthy. Dried fruits like raisins should be eaten in moderation because they don't fill you up as much as water-filled fresh fruit and are higher in sugar.

Each of these boxes contains 13 grams of added sugars and 15 or more grams of sugar compared to fiber per serving, which is higher than what is expert-recommended. Besides the fact that sugar is listed as the second ingredient in this cereal, this box of marshmallows and refined flour also earns a place on our list because it also includes artificial flavors, caramel color, and synthetic preservatives.

Wondering what the worst way to start your day is? It's with a bowl of this cereal, which contains 36 percent of your total recommended intake of added sugars for an entire day. The description of this cereal on Quaker's website? Oh no! Behind pulverized corn flour, this cereal is mostly sugar and molasses, and it has no redeeming nutritional qualities.

Snap, crackle, pop? We commend Kellogg's for FINALLY removing artificial flavors and partially hydrogenated oils trans fat from this cereal , but there's still too much sugar 15 grams if you pour yourself a one-cup serving. This sneaky marketing ploy is making it harder to shop healthy at the supermarket.

It bulged out from his hips and flopped down like a muffin rising up and out over its baking case. He had become quite lazy too, preferring to lounge in front of the fire rather than play in the garden as he used to. His excess weight was slowing him down.

Guaranteed real tuna, the packaging said. Enriched with omega-3 and -6 fats! The small print told another story. What was inside was largely byproducts from other industrial processing: rendered poultry meal mixed with fillers of corn gluten meal, ground rice, soya oil and dried beet pulp. Dodi is our cat, and we know cats do not normally eat carbohydrates such as ground rice or sugar nor corn nor vegetables oils. Nevertheless that's what we had been feeding him. It said on the packets that it was 'scientifically formulated' after all.

The absurdity of feeding an animal types of waste it never evolved to eat that actually makes it fat and sick ought to be easy enough to see. But we have not apparently been alone in our blindness — feline diabetes has risen dramatically in the last few years in the UK. Where the human diet is concerned a similar myopia seems to have descended upon the British. Instead of relying on a food culture developed over centuries, we have come to defer top the pseudo-scientific instructions of professionals and marketeers.

The rise of breakfast cereal makes a revealing case study in the evolutionary process behind the modern diet. One of the earliest convenience foods, processed cereals represents a triumph of marketing, packaging and US economic and foreign policy.

They are the epitome of cheap commodity converted by manufacturing to higher value goods; of agricultural surplus turned into profitable export.

Their ingredients have a disconcerting overlap with my cat food. Somehow they have wormed into our confused consciousness as intrinsically healthy when by and large they are degraded foods that have to have any goodness artificially restored.

I have long been intrigued by how the British breakfast was conquered and what it tells us about the rest of our food. For this is the elephant in the room of course: it is the industrial processing of food that is the real problem. To understand where not we, but rather it, all went wrong, you have to understand the economic and political structures behind today's food system.

The transformation of the British breakfast in the last years has been complete. Unlike our European partners we have succumbed almost entirely to the American invention. A century ago simple cereal grains, cooked either as porridge or bread, were the staples of breakfast around the world and in this country too, just as they had been in previous centuries. When the first National Food Survey was conducted on behalf of the medical officer of the Privy Council, Sir John Simon, in it questioned families of the 'labouring poor' and found that breakfast consisted variously of tea kettle broth bread soaked in hot milk and salt , bread and butter, bread and cheese, milk gruel, bread and water and oatmeal and milk porridge.

Today, instead, the British and the Irish are the largest eaters of puffed, flaked, flavoured, shaped, sugared, salted and extruded cereals in the world.

We munch an average of 6. The Mediterraneans, generally credited with a healthy diet, have so far kept this form of instant breakfast down to an average one kilo per person per year. The French, those cheese-eating surrender monkeys of American opprobrium, have proved culturally resistant to transatlantic pressure in this as in other fields. While the Eastern Europeans, deprived of marketing until the fall of the communism and the break up of the Soviet Union, have barely heard of processed cereals yet, being capable of getting through the first meal of the day with no apparent anxiety and only a few grams a year between them.

How can such a radical overhaul of a food culture come about and was there something peculiarly susceptible about the British and the Americans that led to it? To find out, I went to the US, to the Mid-West states that are the heartland of industrial corn production and to the home of the first cornflakes, to try to understand something of the history and economics of the cereal business. Prepackaged and ready-to-eat breakfast cereals began with the American temperance movement in the nineteenth century.

In the s, the Reverend Sylvester Graham preached the virtues of a vegetarian diet to his congregation and in particular the importance of wholemeal flour. Meat-eating, he said, excited the carnal passions. Granula considered the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal, was developed from his 'Graham flour' by one of his followers, James Caleb Jackson, for patients at the latter's water cure resort.

It was a baked lump of slow-cooked wheat and water that was said to be hard as rock and had to be broken up and soaked overnight to be edible. It was sold at ten times the cost of its ingredients.

The business motive for proselytizing by breakfast cereal was established. There they established the Western Health Reform Institute in to cure hog guzzling and to their mind degenerate Americans of their dyspepsia and vices.

John Harvey Kellogg turned it into the famous Battle Creek Sanatarium, a curious but money-spinning mix of health spa, holiday camp and experimental hospital. Kellogg, a sort of early cross between Billy Graham and Gillian McKeith, set about devising cures for what he believed were the common ills of the day, in particular constipation and masturbation. In Kellogg's mind the two were closely linked, the common cause being a lack of fibre, both dietary and moral. As well as prescribing daily cold water baths, exercise drills, and unorthodox medical interventions, creating health-giving foods for patients was a major preoccupation.

Kellogg, his wife and his younger brother William Keith experimented in the Sanatarium kitchen to produce an easily digested form of cereal. They came up with their own highly profitable Granula, but were promptly sued by Jackson, the original maker of Granula, and had to change the name to Granola. Victorian prudery and religion may have been at the root of processed cereal development, but parables about camels and eyes of needles did not discourage any of these evangelicals from seeing the commercial advantage and using the law to protect their business interests.