My name is Jillian and I am a recovering cereal addict. Before I started drinking Shakeology, I filled my bowl up with cereal every morning. Most of the time, it was with "healthy cereals" - puffed rice, honey nut cheerios, etc, you know, the ones with the least amount of calories per serving? I was a big fan of mixing cereal - if I craved the sweet/"unhealthy" kind, I would mix it with a few other "healthier" varieties, but no matter what, my bowl was always full. It was a great way to start my day, but I was always starving by the time lunch rolled around.
| When I wrote about my "healthy eating" commandments, I stressed the importance of not only reading your food label, but taking note of the serving size. I'm sure you were as surprised as I was to see how one serving of cheerios didn't even fill two champagne glasses! I can't even imagine how many servings I was filling my bowl with back in the day. So, I decided to do a little experiment. I went to the grocery store and bought Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats with a Touch of Fruit. Mini wheats are healthy, right? And they have fruit in them, even better, right? |  one serving of Cheerios via Vreeland Clinic's blog |
 | Let's start with the ingredients. The first ingredient is whole grain wheat - so far, so good. But, the second ingredient is sugar! You don't even find actual fruit until you're about halfway through the "2% or less" ingredients! How does this all contribute to the nutritional breakdown? We've got one gram of fat (with none of it being saturated or trans) and 5 grams of protein, which is great for cereal. When you look at the carbohydrates, we've got 6 grams of fiber - also good! But, as you move down to sugar, you can see that there are 10 grams of sugar per serving. You'd hope maybe some of those sugars come from fruit, but remember, the actual fruit was listed in the "less than 2%" section of the ingredients. If you compare this to a well-known "sugary cereal", Frosted Mini Wheats with a Touch of Fruit only has 3 grams sugar less than Lucky Charms! Is 10 grams of sugar terrible for you? Probably not, but are you really eating only one serving? Now, let's look at serving size. One serving of Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats with a Touch of Fruit is 24 biscuits. Below you can see what 24 biscuits looks like in my cereal bowl. Is that how you fill your cereal bowl? It's certainly not how I fill mine! I added another serving, and my bowl STILL wasn't full! By the time I eye-balled my cereal bowl to "full", the way I would have years ago, I had 60 mini wheats in by bowl - that's 2.5 servings and 25 grams of sugar! To give you an idea of how much sugar that is - one serving of Skittles has 32 grams of sugar, one serving of Twizzlers has 19 grams of sugar and one serving of chocolate ice cream has 17 grams of sugar. Do Frosted Mini Wheats make Twizzlers look "healthy"? |
Am I saying that eating cereal for breakfast is bad? Absolutely not. If you decide that you can't give up your cereal for breakfast, are there ones out there with less sugar? Absolutely! I just hope that I've stressed the importance of not only reading your nutrition labels, but paying attention to serving size as well. If you find that you take the time to measure out one serving of cereal, but now you're hungry well before lunch time, maybe you can consider adding some protein to your breakfast? Or a mid-morning snack? I don't want to recommend certain cereals over others because everyone is going to have a different priority (high protein, high fiber, low sugar, maybe even gluten free), but two brands that I LOVE for cereal are Barbara's and Kashi, but check the labels! Even some of them have a bit much of that pesky sugar!
Do you eat cereal for breakfast? What's your favorite cereal?
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