5 ms·

Sweet Dreams Cereal

29 points by fortran77 4y ago

fauxpause_ 4y ago
It’s sugar
- electric_mayhem 4y ago
  Never underestimate the sleep-inducing power of a diabetic coma.
- qbasic_forever 4y ago
  And marketing. How do we get more people to eat more cereal? Convince them it's not just for breakfast.
seized 4y ago
16 grams of sugar per serving?!? Just the thing for bed time.
khochesh_kushat 4y ago
That's an incredible amount of sugar for just before bed.
ThrowawayTestr 4y ago
I was really hoping for medicated cereal.
- sublinear 4y ago
  Honestly, yeah. It's 2023 and I was expecting it to contain THC or something else similarly attention seeking.
voisin 4y ago
> curated vitamins and minerals like Zinc, Folic Acid and B vitamins to support natural melatonin production What a crock of shit. There’s nothing curated about this. This type of marketing speak makes my ears bleed.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  Technically, they could be picking the most bioactive versions of vitamins and minerals: B12 as methylcobalamin over cyanocobalamin, B6 as pyridoxal-5’-phosphate over pyridoxine, water soluble mineral salts over stomach acid neutralising oxides, etc. Whether they are actually doing this is a matter of their bottom line, and nowhere in their marketing copy does it mention any of these words. Also, none of these cofactors will increase melatonin output long-term if one does not ingest enough B3 (niacin), L-tryptophan and either L-tyrosine or DL-phenylalanine. In a diet deficient of those (think: anything grown using glyphosate) these additional metabolic cofactors might instead contribute to a catecholaminergic and adrenergic insufficiency, essentially running on fumes wrt one’s neurons.
overthrow 4y ago
"Part of a healthy sleep routine" is exactly the same subtle lie as "part of a complete breakfast"
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  It's not even subtle. Carbs before bed are a fast track to diabetes and shortened life. There's nothing remotely healthy about it.
shiftpgdn 4y ago
Nearly everything Post sells is laden with poison in the form of Canola, Soy or other seed oils. The american obesity epidemic is because we let a handful of companies control 90% of our food supply where they have begun to poison us in the name of shareholder profit. The majority of all american food would not be legal to sell in other countries. This is to say nothing in regards to the leagues of sleep research that clearly state you should not be eating before bed, especially this sugar bomb garbage.
- berkle4455 4y ago
  People are obese because of sugar, not oils or fats.
  - tekla 4y ago
    People are obese because they eat too much. You can eat nothing but sugar and stay very thin just fine.
    - zihotki 4y ago
      But that won't last long before you get problems with your digestive system or anything less. Diet must be balanced.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Mainly sugars but those junk foods are also laden with low quality fats which crank up the calories . I’m not sure why the parent thinks seed oils are bad per se
mproud 4y ago
The whole “breakfast cereal” industry is a load of trash. It’s all propaganda that started in the ’40s. People shouldn’t eat much of anything just before bed, and no one needs to eat much of anything in the morning, let alone consume several hundreds of Calories before lunch.
- 100721 4y ago
  This post feels intended to resonate with people who already agree with you. Inflammatory language, no citations, and blanket statements of fact. This is how echo chambers are formed.
  - VLM 4y ago
    Yet, no factual errors, and the entire product category literally benefits no one except shareholders, certainly of no medical or dietary benefit LOL.
    - karaterobot 4y ago
      No factual errors? Saying that nobody should eat anything in the morning is almost certainly a factual error. Even if it were true that there were rigorous studies leading to a broad scientific consensus that it is better for most people to avoid certain kinds of food for some period after waking up — which I am fairly sure is not the case — saying nobody should eat anything "in the morning" is just a silly thing to say. I've never seen any reliable science that concluded something so categorical and broad when it comes to nutrition.
      - failrate 4y ago
        They did not say "eat nothing". They said you do not "need to eat much of anything".
        waboremo 4y ago
        Which has very little reproducible support backing it as a universal guidance for meal timings or caloric intake per meal.
pdntspa 4y ago
Yeah lets just give people a fuckload of sugar and carbs right before bed, and then presumably ignore them when they complain about waking up prematurely and being unable to go back to sleep.
762236 4y ago
With wearables that track resting heart rate and HRV, you can see that your body gets better rest and sleep when you stop eating around three hours before bed.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  You should (typically, when not fasting), however, eat before bed. At least personally I find it more difficult to sleep on an empty stomach than one that's been filled anytime before bed.
- lumb63 4y ago
  YMMV, but I’ve found my own results to be (to my surprise) in contradiction with that. For me, a meal close to bed is associated with about a 9% increase in subjective sleep quality, and 13% increase in sleep quantity. I’ve been using an app called Bearable to log such info for about 4 months now. Sadly I don’t have HRV data correlations (they’re working on that!). A few theories I have for why this is the case: More carbs before bed increases muscle and liver glycogen (assuming your stores are not full. Mine usually are not since I typically work out in the evening) which requires water to store. Henceforth, carbs close to bed should lower chances that you have to get up to urinate during the night. Carbs also lower cortisol levels and thus may promote relaxation. Amino acids in meat like tryptophan also create a feeling of sleepiness (post-Thanksgiving nap, anyone?). Maybe there’s something to the whole “rest and digest” after all.
piyushpr134 4y ago
Full of sugar, just before bedtime...that's all you need to get diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. What an amazing snack!
jasonpeacock 4y ago
A 1C serving is 230 calories, it has 16g of sugar of which is 13g _added_ sugar (the 3rd ingredient is cane sugar). That's _3 teaspoons_ of sugar you're eating before bed (and is 27% of your RDA, I hope you had nothing else sweet all day). There's no diet where this is healthy for you.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  A diabetic coma is a type of sleep I guess...
  - gruez 4y ago
    A diabetic coma is caused by a lack of blood sugar. Sugary cereal would certainly not cause it, at least in the short term.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - travisporter 4y ago
      https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-complications/hyperglycaemic-hyperosmolar-nonketotic-coma.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-complications/hyperglyca...
gcanyon 4y ago
20% of the calories are from added sugar. That can't be good right before bed.
failrate 4y ago
Do not eat before bed. Activation of your digestive system will definitely keep you awake. Of all the cynical attempts to squeeze more money out of their customers...
jgerrish 4y ago
Free one-hitter with every box! Did you get the Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell or Jason Bateman one? We are funny and clever marketing people. Yes, we can all Google Scholar REM sleep studies on various substances. Christ, I don't want to be this character. And that's important.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- IIsi50MHz 4y ago
  I understand all those words individually, but could not construct a parse tree.
  - jgerrish 4y ago
    I'm sorry, the language style was terse and short, and ignored the diversity of our media landscape. Imagine Kristen Bell or Terry Crews Pez Dispensers, but for stoners. That's the joke. The other mumbling was a response to the rightfully concerned diabetic and good sleep crowd. We know caffeine and other substances like sugar will disrupt sleep. We can just look it up on Google Scholar and be careful with our trustees. Being the character... Well, I don't really want to be that person with that rebel "identity". But I fixed the other issues. I'm sorry you had to call it out.
n8cpdx 4y ago
- plenty of people are fine with a light snack before bed. Serving size is kind of large but you can always have a smaller portion (as I do for almost any cereal type product I eat). Compare to ice cream or a single serving of soda, which many people have in the evening. - The American classic/stereotypical diet has a lot of sugar in breakfast foods. My experience is that starting the day with dessert (cereal, donuts) sets up a pretty bad sugar crash/energy roller coaster. I try to limit sweets and save them for as late as possible so that I’m not getting rebound hunger/crashes for the rest of the day. Repositioning cereal as a dessert style item might not be the disaster for human health that some other commenters suggest, especially if it carves a path out of the current business model.
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  I feel like I'm witnessing another moment where HN gets stuck on its own ability to play devils advocate or be the "Technically..." crowd. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959843/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959843/ Speaking as an American, the reason we're here is because people have had too much sugar, fat, and salt shoved down their throats. From Kool Aid having over 50% of daily sugar per serving while being labeled as a good source of vitamin C. Lucky Charms touting iron and magnesium while also having an over abundance of sugar. Because companies like Post write shit like this: "Sweet Dreams cereal is made with delicious and wholesome ingredients, a nighttime herbal blend of lavender and chamomile, and curated vitamins and minerals like Zinc, Folic Acid and B vitamins to support natural melatonin production. " This is a dessert that's being sold as a health product. It's a piece of an ongoing problem. Yes there's people who can eat before bed, yay for them and their awesome bodies (or sad for them if they're those real but not at all the norm people who can't gain weight no matter how much they eat and wish they could bulk up), unhealthy eating is a problem and this stuff isn't helping.
robg 4y ago
The marketing of course ignoring that eating anything 2-3 hours before sleep is bad for sleep quality. Great area for better research, start with the good enough wearables and into brain monitoring to show impacts of cognitive functions the next day.
libraryatnight 4y ago
My doctor said eating before bed is a great way to put on weight and given peoples propensity to make their before bed snack sweet to also set yourself down a path of diabetes. So Post selling a sugary night cereal is just awesome. Good job MBAs.
- crazygringo 4y ago
  It's incredibly dependent on the person and their activity and mealtimes. I personally need to eat a bunch of carbs before bed the day after a heavy workout. That's when my muscles do most of their repair/growth, and if there aren't enough carbs to fuel that I wake up horribly sore. But even if you're not working out, some people eat dinner really early like at 5 pm. They need a snack or even light meal before bed to fuel the body's everyday recovery at night. A moderate amount of cereal with milk is a pretty decent option here. Better than ice cream or chocolates for sure. For some people, it definitely is true that eating close to bedtime leads to weight gain. But this is not even close to universal, different bodies process food differently. Other people need food to get them through the night and don't gain weight at all.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - libraryatnight 4y ago
    There's not a person on the planet that would benefit from eating sugar cereal sludge before sleep. If you're some kind of athlete and it's not hurting you that's not the same as it being good for you. This is a bad product selling a bad habit: more sugar.
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      When my blood sugar gets super low I need sugary carbs RIGHT NOW. Or else it's not healthy and I quickly become unwell. That can happen right before bedtime sometimes, because you didn't eat enough earlier. So please don't say no one would benefit. Low blood sugar is a real issue for some people. Eating sugar simply brings it back to a baseline, and then starches will keep it there. And this can happen at any time of day. Some people never need this. But different people are different.
samstave 4y ago
I recommend the "food that built america" series - and the history of the Post family/General Mills - how Grape Nuts was a stoic cereal used in asylums as a mental health medicine... Its where our breakfast, and a lot of our current Candy empires were born. (including the influence on frozen foods (Birds Eye).
redleggedfrog 4y ago
Well that's some pure evil from Post's marketing dept.

Sweet Dreams Cereal

29 points by fortran77 4y ago

fauxpause_ 4y ago

It’s sugar

electric_mayhem 4y ago
Never underestimate the sleep-inducing power of a diabetic coma.
qbasic_forever 4y ago
And marketing. How do we get more people to eat more cereal? Convince them it's not just for breakfast.

seized 4y ago

16 grams of sugar per serving?!? Just the thing for bed time.

khochesh_kushat 4y ago

That's an incredible amount of sugar for just before bed.

ThrowawayTestr 4y ago

I was really hoping for medicated cereal.

sublinear 4y ago
Honestly, yeah. It's 2023 and I was expecting it to contain THC or something else similarly attention seeking.

voisin 4y ago

> curated vitamins and minerals like Zinc, Folic Acid and B vitamins to support natural melatonin production What a crock of shit. There’s nothing curated about this. This type of marketing speak makes my ears bleed.

eurasiantiger 4y ago
Technically, they could be picking the most bioactive versions of vitamins and minerals: B12 as methylcobalamin over cyanocobalamin, B6 as pyridoxal-5’-phosphate over pyridoxine, water soluble mineral salts over stomach acid neutralising oxides, etc. Whether they are actually doing this is a matter of their bottom line, and nowhere in their marketing copy does it mention any of these words. Also, none of these cofactors will increase melatonin output long-term if one does not ingest enough B3 (niacin), L-tryptophan and either L-tyrosine or DL-phenylalanine. In a diet deficient of those (think: anything grown using glyphosate) these additional metabolic cofactors might instead contribute to a catecholaminergic and adrenergic insufficiency, essentially running on fumes wrt one’s neurons.

overthrow 4y ago

"Part of a healthy sleep routine" is exactly the same subtle lie as "part of a complete breakfast"

MacsHeadroom 4y ago
It's not even subtle. Carbs before bed are a fast track to diabetes and shortened life. There's nothing remotely healthy about it.

shiftpgdn 4y ago

Nearly everything Post sells is laden with poison in the form of Canola, Soy or other seed oils. The american obesity epidemic is because we let a handful of companies control 90% of our food supply where they have begun to poison us in the name of shareholder profit. The majority of all american food would not be legal to sell in other countries. This is to say nothing in regards to the leagues of sleep research that clearly state you should not be eating before bed, especially this sugar bomb garbage.

berkle4455 4y ago
People are obese because of sugar, not oils or fats.
- tekla 4y ago
  People are obese because they eat too much. You can eat nothing but sugar and stay very thin just fine.
  - zihotki 4y ago
    But that won't last long before you get problems with your digestive system or anything less. Diet must be balanced.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Mainly sugars but those junk foods are also laden with low quality fats which crank up the calories . I’m not sure why the parent thinks seed oils are bad per se

mproud 4y ago

The whole “breakfast cereal” industry is a load of trash. It’s all propaganda that started in the ’40s. People shouldn’t eat much of anything just before bed, and no one needs to eat much of anything in the morning, let alone consume several hundreds of Calories before lunch.

100721 4y ago
This post feels intended to resonate with people who already agree with you. Inflammatory language, no citations, and blanket statements of fact. This is how echo chambers are formed.
- VLM 4y ago
  Yet, no factual errors, and the entire product category literally benefits no one except shareholders, certainly of no medical or dietary benefit LOL.
  - karaterobot 4y ago
    No factual errors? Saying that nobody should eat anything in the morning is almost certainly a factual error. Even if it were true that there were rigorous studies leading to a broad scientific consensus that it is better for most people to avoid certain kinds of food for some period after waking up — which I am fairly sure is not the case — saying nobody should eat anything "in the morning" is just a silly thing to say. I've never seen any reliable science that concluded something so categorical and broad when it comes to nutrition.
    - failrate 4y ago
      They did not say "eat nothing". They said you do not "need to eat much of anything".
      - waboremo 4y ago
        Which has very little reproducible support backing it as a universal guidance for meal timings or caloric intake per meal.

pdntspa 4y ago

Yeah lets just give people a fuckload of sugar and carbs right before bed, and then presumably ignore them when they complain about waking up prematurely and being unable to go back to sleep.

762236 4y ago

With wearables that track resting heart rate and HRV, you can see that your body gets better rest and sleep when you stop eating around three hours before bed.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
You should (typically, when not fasting), however, eat before bed. At least personally I find it more difficult to sleep on an empty stomach than one that's been filled anytime before bed.
lumb63 4y ago
YMMV, but I’ve found my own results to be (to my surprise) in contradiction with that. For me, a meal close to bed is associated with about a 9% increase in subjective sleep quality, and 13% increase in sleep quantity. I’ve been using an app called Bearable to log such info for about 4 months now. Sadly I don’t have HRV data correlations (they’re working on that!). A few theories I have for why this is the case: More carbs before bed increases muscle and liver glycogen (assuming your stores are not full. Mine usually are not since I typically work out in the evening) which requires water to store. Henceforth, carbs close to bed should lower chances that you have to get up to urinate during the night. Carbs also lower cortisol levels and thus may promote relaxation. Amino acids in meat like tryptophan also create a feeling of sleepiness (post-Thanksgiving nap, anyone?). Maybe there’s something to the whole “rest and digest” after all.

piyushpr134 4y ago

Full of sugar, just before bedtime...that's all you need to get diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. What an amazing snack!

jasonpeacock 4y ago

A 1C serving is 230 calories, it has 16g of sugar of which is 13g _added_ sugar (the 3rd ingredient is cane sugar). That's _3 teaspoons_ of sugar you're eating before bed (and is 27% of your RDA, I hope you had nothing else sweet all day). There's no diet where this is healthy for you.

giantrobot 4y ago
A diabetic coma is a type of sleep I guess...
- gruez 4y ago
  A diabetic coma is caused by a lack of blood sugar. Sugary cereal would certainly not cause it, at least in the short term.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - travisporter 4y ago
    https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-complications/hyperglycaemic-hyperosmolar-nonketotic-coma.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-complications/hyperglyca...

gcanyon 4y ago

20% of the calories are from added sugar. That can't be good right before bed.

failrate 4y ago

Do not eat before bed. Activation of your digestive system will definitely keep you awake. Of all the cynical attempts to squeeze more money out of their customers...

jgerrish 4y ago

Free one-hitter with every box! Did you get the Seth Rogen, Will Ferrell or Jason Bateman one? We are funny and clever marketing people. Yes, we can all Google Scholar REM sleep studies on various substances. Christ, I don't want to be this character. And that's important.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
IIsi50MHz 4y ago
I understand all those words individually, but could not construct a parse tree.
- jgerrish 4y ago
  I'm sorry, the language style was terse and short, and ignored the diversity of our media landscape. Imagine Kristen Bell or Terry Crews Pez Dispensers, but for stoners. That's the joke. The other mumbling was a response to the rightfully concerned diabetic and good sleep crowd. We know caffeine and other substances like sugar will disrupt sleep. We can just look it up on Google Scholar and be careful with our trustees. Being the character... Well, I don't really want to be that person with that rebel "identity". But I fixed the other issues. I'm sorry you had to call it out.

n8cpdx 4y ago

- plenty of people are fine with a light snack before bed. Serving size is kind of large but you can always have a smaller portion (as I do for almost any cereal type product I eat). Compare to ice cream or a single serving of soda, which many people have in the evening. - The American classic/stereotypical diet has a lot of sugar in breakfast foods. My experience is that starting the day with dessert (cereal, donuts) sets up a pretty bad sugar crash/energy roller coaster. I try to limit sweets and save them for as late as possible so that I’m not getting rebound hunger/crashes for the rest of the day. Repositioning cereal as a dessert style item might not be the disaster for human health that some other commenters suggest, especially if it carves a path out of the current business model.

libraryatnight 4y ago
I feel like I'm witnessing another moment where HN gets stuck on its own ability to play devils advocate or be the "Technically..." crowd. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959843/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959843/ Speaking as an American, the reason we're here is because people have had too much sugar, fat, and salt shoved down their throats. From Kool Aid having over 50% of daily sugar per serving while being labeled as a good source of vitamin C. Lucky Charms touting iron and magnesium while also having an over abundance of sugar. Because companies like Post write shit like this: "Sweet Dreams cereal is made with delicious and wholesome ingredients, a nighttime herbal blend of lavender and chamomile, and curated vitamins and minerals like Zinc, Folic Acid and B vitamins to support natural melatonin production. " This is a dessert that's being sold as a health product. It's a piece of an ongoing problem. Yes there's people who can eat before bed, yay for them and their awesome bodies (or sad for them if they're those real but not at all the norm people who can't gain weight no matter how much they eat and wish they could bulk up), unhealthy eating is a problem and this stuff isn't helping.

robg 4y ago

The marketing of course ignoring that eating anything 2-3 hours before sleep is bad for sleep quality. Great area for better research, start with the good enough wearables and into brain monitoring to show impacts of cognitive functions the next day.

libraryatnight 4y ago

My doctor said eating before bed is a great way to put on weight and given peoples propensity to make their before bed snack sweet to also set yourself down a path of diabetes. So Post selling a sugary night cereal is just awesome. Good job MBAs.

crazygringo 4y ago
It's incredibly dependent on the person and their activity and mealtimes. I personally need to eat a bunch of carbs before bed the day after a heavy workout. That's when my muscles do most of their repair/growth, and if there aren't enough carbs to fuel that I wake up horribly sore. But even if you're not working out, some people eat dinner really early like at 5 pm. They need a snack or even light meal before bed to fuel the body's everyday recovery at night. A moderate amount of cereal with milk is a pretty decent option here. Better than ice cream or chocolates for sure. For some people, it definitely is true that eating close to bedtime leads to weight gain. But this is not even close to universal, different bodies process food differently. Other people need food to get them through the night and don't gain weight at all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- libraryatnight 4y ago
  There's not a person on the planet that would benefit from eating sugar cereal sludge before sleep. If you're some kind of athlete and it's not hurting you that's not the same as it being good for you. This is a bad product selling a bad habit: more sugar.
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    When my blood sugar gets super low I need sugary carbs RIGHT NOW. Or else it's not healthy and I quickly become unwell. That can happen right before bedtime sometimes, because you didn't eat enough earlier. So please don't say no one would benefit. Low blood sugar is a real issue for some people. Eating sugar simply brings it back to a baseline, and then starches will keep it there. And this can happen at any time of day. Some people never need this. But different people are different.

samstave 4y ago

I recommend the "food that built america" series - and the history of the Post family/General Mills - how Grape Nuts was a stoic cereal used in asylums as a mental health medicine... Its where our breakfast, and a lot of our current Candy empires were born. (including the influence on frozen foods (Birds Eye).

redleggedfrog 4y ago

Well that's some pure evil from Post's marketing dept.