Food: How Healthy Is Your Cereal?

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How Healthy Is Your Cereal?
Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Across the country, adults are concerned with their diets and their weight. Standard wisdom suggests that we should be eating differently for all of our meals, and one easy change to make is to move from sugar and fat-laden breakfast foods to more nutritious and healthy cereals. Right? Well, not exactly.

It's true that sugary breakfast pastries are not the best idea on a regular basis. This takes in many of the convenience breakfast foods, as well as doughnuts and strudels. It's also true that an overabundance of bacon, sausage, eggs and so forth probably add too much fat to our diet, and so should be eaten sparingly for breakfast, if at all. Pancakes, toast and waffles are full of carbohydrates, but would probably be all right most of the time, except most of us insist on doctoring them up with butter, sugar, syrup, or jelly.

So that leaves cereal as a breakfast staple. Now, don't get me wrong. Whole grained, plain cereals are very healthy for most people. We run into trouble quickly, though, when we rely on the grocery store labels to help us choose which are the healthiest types of cereal. Many that have the "healthy" labels are not as good as they sound.

They are probably using whole grains rather than refined flour and that's a plus. But check those labels carefully. By law, companies are now required to list nutritional values and to be honest about exactly how much salt, sugar, and so forth is hiding in those flakes. They also must list the ingredients in the order of how much of each item is in the food. Look for sugar and salt high in the list. Even cereals marketed for adults have a surprising amount of sugar in them!

Many of the flavored flakes are almost as bad for you as the sugary children's cereals that we so scrupulously avoid. Check the label and you'll see what I mean. Those gobs of flavor crunches that taste so good get their good taste from things that are bad for you. Some raisin cereals even sugar their raisins! You have to be a careful and savvy consumer to notice all of the ways that cereal manufacturers hide sugars and fats in their products.

Your best bet, if you are trying to eat as healthy of a breakfast as possible, is to stick to the plain, unadorned cereals. These old-fashioned stand-bys are still just as pure as they were fifty or seventy-five years ago. Rolled oats, toasted oat rings, shredded wheat, plain flakes, and similar types of cereals are just as good for you as they were long ago. They have no added sugars or salts, and most have a minimum of preservatives. Whenever flavor or "goodness" is added into your cereal, you can bet that there are added calories and other things that you do not want hiding in there as well.

We might as well face it. Cereal is cereal, and it will always be pretty boring to most of us. When we start to dress it up, we add calories, carbohydrates and fats. These are the very things that we're trying to avoid! Plain cereal is most likely to meet your dietary needs if not those of your palate. If you must dress up your cereal, buy some bananas or strawberries while you're at the grocery store and cut some fresh fruit into it. You'll add a few calories, but you'll also be adding plenty of nutrition and vitamins. Calories that carry their weight in nutrition aren't nearly so bad as those empty calories.

Be careful about the milk you put onto your cereal, too. Whole milk and even two percent milk are pretty hefty in the fat and calorie department. Skim milk or soy milk is much better for you. Another place to watch those calories is in the serving size. So many of us pour a bowl of cereal and splash on a little milk, and feel smug that we've eaten a good breakfast. What we fail to see is that the serving size on which those calories and other nutritional values are based is about half of what we normally eat. Try measuring it for yourself for a few days. Pour out a normal serving of your favorite cereal and then get out your measuring cup to see just how it stacks up to the recommended serving size. Chances are that you will find that you are eating more than you thought you were.

So eating cereal is a good start for a healthy breakfast, but each of us needs to watch for hidden problems. Not all cereals are as nutritious as their manufacturers would like us to believe. Not all cereals are created equally, even if they are marketed towards weight-conscious adults. And not all cereals are eaten in such a way as to maintain their low-calorie, high fiber value. A lot depends on how much we eat and what we eat it with.

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