How do you choose a healthy breakfast cereal?

An effective weight loss strategy starts with ensuring you do not miss breakfast; a good breakfast will provide the fuel your body needs to get you through the morning. Most people choose a cereal to start their day, but how do you go about the task of choosing a breakfast cereal that will enhance weight loss?

How do you go about choosing your breakfast cereal? Do you look at the packaging? Or the free gift promoted by the manufacturer? Or do you make your choice based on the nutritional content on the packaging?

Granted that you have to have some form of criteria to make an informed choice, what criteria is important? And how do you apply this information to make your choice? The purpose of this article is to guide your decision making, compare some cereals and analyse its contents.

The first criteria I will look at is the carbohydrate content. Carbohydrate consists of sugar and starch. I will look at the total carbohydrates expressed in grams per 100 grams, how much of it is from sugar. You can then deduce the quantity of starch, if the information is not expressed on the packaging. E.g. total carbohydrate 67 grams of which sugar 22 grams. That is how the information is expressed in majority of cases. From this information I know there is 45 grams of starch in 100 grams. The more starch there is compared to the sugar will determine on this criteria what is best. It is also useful to determine whether the sugar is from natural sources or is added.   

The next criterion which is closely related to the first is the amount of added sugar. Why is this information important? Well, some cereals that have a lot of fruit will have high sugar content.  Sugar derived from fruit is healthy, ordinary sugar is not. Check the ingredients for sugar, if it is listed then majority of the sugar could be added, especially if there are no fruits in the cereal. Look out for no added sugar that will tell you that the sugar is from the fruit. 

The next criterion is the amount of fibre present. You want a cereal with a reasonable amount of fibre. Fibre helps in the digestion and excretion process. A lot of people do not take in enough fibre. Sometimes fibre is classified into soluble and non soluble fibre. For this article the distinction is not important.

The amount of salt present is another criterion to be considered. The less salt the better, especially if you have a predisposition for hypertension.

Fat content should also be considered. There is a distinction between saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fat. The poly and monounsaturated fats are the healthy fats. The saturated fats you want to eat less off. The total fat content minus the saturated fat will leave you with the healthy fat.

Protein content is also important. You want your breakfast cereal to have a reasonable amount of protein in it.

There are no hard and fast rules needed when applying the above rules, judgement is needed to determine what is appropriate for you bearing in mind your overall health objective.     

So without further ado let’s apply some information I have obtained from some popular cereal boxes. (This is how the information is expressed in the UK)

Name of cereal	Total calories Per 100 gr	Carbs Grams Per 100gr	Sugar Grams Per 100gr	Fat Grams Per 100gr	Fibre Grams Per 100gr	Salt Grams Per 100gr	Protein Grams Per 100gr
Bran Flakes	326	67	22	2 Sat 0.5	15	1.3	10
All bran	280	48	17	3.5 Sat 0.7	27	1.55	14
Weetabix	358	68.6	4.4	2.0 Sat 0.6	10.0	0.26	11.5
Special K	374	75	17	1.5 Sat 0.4	2.5	1.15	15
Corn flakes	372	84	8	0.9 Sat 0.2	3	1.8	7
shreddies	351	73.7	15.5	1.9 Sat 0.4	9.8	0.99	9.9
Rice krispies	381	87	10	1 Sat 0.2	1	1.65	6
Museli jordans	321	60	15.3 No added sugar	4.7 Sat 0.8	10.4	trace	8.9
Alpen	374	64.6	16.3 No added sugar	6.2 Sat 0.9	7.8	0.12	11.1
Scotts  porrage(oats)	356	60	1.1	8 Sat 1.5	9	trace	11
Frosties	371	87	37	0.6 Sat 0.1	2	1.15	4.5

Weigh up all the criteria and make your choice, I will really like to hear what you think.

What is your favourite breakfast cereal?

You can see from the above it is hard to choose a cereal , I hope this article helps you in making your future choices .You can apply this knowledge when making decisions regarding  other foods.  

I leave you with my final thought what’s so special about special k?