5 ms·
What confuses me most is the popularity of breakfast cereal. This stuff is ridiculously unhealthy, on many levels, but the easiest attack is on the sugar conten
by johnloeber 10y ago
What confuses me most is the popularity of breakfast cereal. This stuff is ridiculously unhealthy, on many levels, but the easiest attack is on the sugar content: most breakfast cereals are around 30% sugar by weight.
Frosted Flakes? That's 11 grams of sugar per 30 gram portion. Coco Pops? 12 grams of sugar per 31 gram portion. Honey Smacks? A mind-blowing, god-help-you 15 grams of sugar per 27 gram portion. Yes, these little delights are more accurately described as "pure sugar" (55.5%) than as "puffed wheat cereal" (44.5%).
What about something healthy-sounding, like honey-nut cheerios? Fooled you! 9 grams of sugar per 28 gram portion. The smart marketers know that the general public is catching on to the fact that maybe you shouldn't eat a bag of sugar every day, so they say it's sweetened with honey. Honey sounds good and wholesome, right? Well, it's 81% sugar by weight, so you decide.
Even something as bland-tasting as Rice Krispies is 10% sugar by weight. A large bowl of these for breakfast is still the same as munching on a tablespoon of sugar.
- tomjen3 10y agoPlus who eats 30 grams of cereal?
- johnloeber 10y agoThat's what the nutritional label's "standard serving size" is. Of course the actual normal serving is much larger -- at least twice that.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> That's what the nutritional label's "standard serving size" is. Interestingly, most of the cereals I buy (which have vastly less sugar per identified servings than the ones being pointed to) tend to have standard serving sizes of around 55g, not 30g.
- johnloeber 10y agoWhat cereals do you buy?
- scotty79 10y ago> What confuses me most is the popularity of breakfast cereal. It's the laziest breakfast I can make for myself. Even cutting slice of bread looks like more work than trowing some random debris in milk.
- dualogy 10y agoIf you feel too lazy to furnish proper nourishment for yourself, you're not really hungry. (Which is fine, people love to snack after all.)
- pjc50 10y agoSometimes the other way round for people, especially at the end of the day: too tired to prep properly and too hungry to wait.
- scotty79 10y agoI'm rarely ever hungry. If I don't eat I get a headache, don't have energy to eat anything and fall asleep. When I wake up I have strength to make myself some food but it's hard for me to tell if I'm doing it because I'm hungry or if I'm doing it just because I know I need it after yesterday. When I was a baby I never cried because of hunger, I was just falling asleep.
- collyw 10y agoI find the opposite. When I am really hungry (usually after a long bike ride or similar) I will eat almost anything. Usually I don't have a sweet tooth, but in those cases, I crave sugary stuff far more than normal.
- zhte415 10y ago>> If you feel too lazy to furnish proper nourishment for yourself, you're not really hungry. This is incorrect, probably worrying.
- Noughmad 10y agoYou can buy a box of muesli with fruit and/or nuts, and it's still better than the "cereals" that are mostly sugar. It takes the same amount of effort. When I have time, I even buy the ingredients separately and mix them once in a big container.
- dualogy 10y agoWell, sugar salt and fat (milk/yogurt in the case of breakfast cereal) are the time-proven only workable ways of shuttling food stuffs into the human mouth that on their own are more fit for birds or goats, whether cereal grains or salad greens. Irony of the "balanced-diet" human omnivore.