Healthy Cereal Guide

1. Ezekiel 4:9 / 2. Butterfly Bakery of Vermont / 3. Cascadian Farms Purely O’s / 4. Arrowhead Mills / 5. Barbara’s Brown Rice Crisps

As a child of the 50’s, I ate cold cereal for breakfast on most mornings. We could help ourselves and my mom was free to do other chores.

My father thought boxed cereal was great because as a child of the Depression era, he had to eat porridge or oatmeal every day. He often commented how fortunate we were to have tasty cereal!

When we ran out of cold cereal, we took white bread, sprinkled sugar on it, and poured milk over it. (It’s amazing we all survived, although I did seriously clean up my diet in my twenties).

A Short History of Sugary Boxed Cereal

Sugar was introduced to cold cereal in the 1950’s, and pretty soon every brand was named “Sugar This” and “Sugar That.”

Sugar Smacks had the distinction of having the most sugar by weight of any cereal on the market when it debuted in the early 1950s. Fifty-six percent of the cereal was sugar (this shows you how far things have come!). The Eisenhower Era also gave us iconic cereals like Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, and Alpha-Bits.

When I had my children in the 1980’s, I had just rejected eating any sugar (the Sugar Blues book was popular back then) so I switched breakfast cereal to healthy porridge. Rice, millet, oats, and other whole grains were cooked into a hot whole grain breakfast with soy milk.

My son would visit his cousins and ask for something “cold and crunchy with cow’s milk.” There were a few cereal brands that didn’t have added sugar but they were hard to find–Erewhon’s Crispy Brown Rice, Oatios, and Kellogg’s Nutri Grain cereal were our three favorites, but the they all have since been discontinued. Today, sugar has crept back into cold cereals even the organic, “healthy” ones.

Healthy Cereal Guide

We set out to find the healthiest cold cereals to write this guide, because we know our readers want the convenience without compromising their health.

Ultimately, when you go for convenience, you are often compromising your health, but I think the key is to keep those compromises to a minimum and make sure that at least 80% of your food fresh, whole, and organic.

A Problem with “Healthy” Cereal: Extruded Grains

Our Healthy Baby Puffs Guide offers details on what’s wrong with pretty much all boxed cold cereals, which is the process of extrusion. The bottom line is this: extrusion–mixing grains with water and processing that paste through a special device (plus high heat) to produce a desired shape–compromises the integrity of the grains’ nutrients, breaks the bonds of fatty acids, inactivates enzymes, and increases the glycemic index of the food.

This is one reason that really no cold cereal can be considered truly Good Stuff when compared to, say, a bowl of oatmeal.

How to Find Healthy Cereal

Just like everything else, label-reading is important when shopping for healthy cereal. When categorizing popular brands for this guide, we considered:

• Number of grams of sugar per serving. We wanted less than five.
• Type of sugar used. We gave preference to brands that use healthier sugars like palm or date.
• Type of fat. We don’t like canola oil or soybean oil.
• The number of ingredients. Less is usually better, although there are some exceptions to this.
• Quality of ingredients. We dinged brands for fillers like “modified corn starch,” and gave preference to brands that contain all or mostly organic ingredients.

Of course, some of this can be subjective; I know that some people aren’t comfortable with any extruded grains at all. This guide is obviously not for them.

Is There Arsenic in Healthy Cereal?

You’ve probably heard that rice, and particularly brown rice, is often contaminated with arsenic. This is unfortunately true, and so we gave extra points to those cereals that don’t contain rice.

Of course, many of our Good and Okay cereals do contain rice, so just consider eating these in moderation, especially if there is a lot of rice in your diet otherwise.

The Granola Problem

Above, you’ll see one brand of truly healthful granola, listed as Good Stuff. Unfortunately, most brands of granola you find in health food stores contain a lot of either cane sugar or cane syrup. This includes:

• Cascadian Farm Organic Granola
• HempYeah! Granola
• One Degree Granola
• Back to Nature Granola
• Kind Granola (also contains canola oil)

To your health,

P.S. You’ll notice in this post that I’ve linked a variety of a lot of these cereals to be purchased at Thrive Market. If you aren’t familiar with Thrive, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s a Costco-meets-Whole Foods-meets-Amazon model, with hard-to-find healthful foods delivered–for free–at steeply discounted prices.

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