Healthy Cereal Guide

1. Ezekiel 4:9 / 2. Cascadian Farms Purely O’s / 3. Lovebird / 4. Arrowhead Mills / 5. One Degree Brown Rice Crips

As a child of the 50’s, most mornings I ate cold cereal for breakfast. It was convenient, quick, and easily accessible. We could help ourselves and my mom was free to do other chores. It was not particularly nutritious and it was full of sugar. During this time, cereals blossomed into the sweet treat we know today.

This was the decade that sugar was introduced to our cereal in a positive light. Most brands were “Sugar This” and “Sugar That” and there were Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs and Sugar Smacks. We often think processed food is bad today but keep in mind Kellogg’s Sugar Smacks had the distinction of having the most sugar by weight of any cereal on the market when it debuted in the early 1950’s. Fifty-six percent of the cereal was sugar! That would never fly today.

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 and have since enjoyed excellent health).

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. We might add a little honey or maple syrup for sweetness or just fresh fruit.

My son would visit his cousins and ask for something “cold and crunchy with cow’s milk,” which was code for that boxed cereal with milk that kids eat. 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. I suspect they sell better the sweeter they are. It is important to check the sugar content today because some are quite sweet. The recommendation by healthychildren.org is less than 25 grams (6 teaspoons) of sugar per day for children 2 years old and older. Under 2 years avoid added sugar. I try and look for natural sugars like coconut, maple or honey rather than white sugar in cereals.

Healthy Cereal Guide

Approximately 283 million Americans eat cold cereal every day! For that reason, it is important to make sure the cereal we eat promotes health. It is a convenient food so we set out to find the healthiest cold cereals, 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 is fresh, whole, and organic. When choosing a boxed cereal, we looked for organic and low sugar content. We looked at the source of the sugar and kept in mind that coconut sugar has a glycemic index of 35, which is significantly lower than cane sugar’s glycemic index of 68. Coconut sugar retains many nutrients found in the coconut palm — mostly iron, zinc, calcium, and potassium. Coconut sugar also contains the soluble fiber inulin, which is linked to a lower risk of blood sugar spikes. Real Maple Syrup has a glycemic index of 54. Maple syrup is defined as having a “medium” index. Maple syrup has a nutritional advantage over sugar because it does not contain any additives, and the processing allows it to retain its nutrients, including manganese, riboflavin, zinc, magnesium, calcium, and potassium. Maple Syrup is rich in antioxidants and therefore may have anti-inflammatory and prebiotic activity, so it may help support gut health. Honey has a glycemic index of 58. While honey comes with more calories, carbohydrates, and grams of sugar than white sugar does, it does have more nutrients and health properties to offer, and in some cases, it may be a healthier choice over sugar. Honey’s advantages over sugar include a slightly lower glycemic index and It contains more vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, such as calcium, potassium, vitamin C, zinc, phenolic acids, and flavonoids.

We also looked at any oils or other additives that were added to the cereal. Obviously, most cereals don’ t need oil but if they did contain oil (Granola for example) then we looked for high quality oils like coconut and olive. Sunflower oil is ubiquitous and in so many foods that we eliminated those cereals from Good Stuff.

One additional nutritional consideration when choosing a cereal is to look at the nutritional panel and add together the grams of fiber and protein and compare that to the grams of sugar. The combined grams of fiber and protein should be more than the grams of sugar. Cascadian Farm organic O’s is a good example. It has 4 grams Fiber and 4 grams of Protein (8 combined) compared to 1 gram of Sugar. Our best cereal Ezekial 4:9 Original has 1 gram of Sugar, 8 grams of Protein, 6 grams of Fiber (14 combined).

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 a whole natural food when compared to, say, a bowl of oatmeal. For Good Stuff we looked at the grams of sugar, the source of the sugar, the combined grams of protein and fiber compared to the grams of sugar, the number of ingredients, and the quality of the ingredients. Everyone has to decide for themselves how much sugar they’re comfortable with or what ingredients they’re ok with. We worked within our own boundaries as consumers who are comfortable with cold cereal for convenience and taste while also, choosing ones that are in our view are the best.

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 looked for ones with less than five. Coconut sugar is
• Look at the grams of fiber and protein and add them together and they should be less than or equal to the grams of sugar.
• Type of sugar used. We gave preference to brands that use healthier sugars like coconut, maple, or honey.
• Type of fat. Vegetable oils and they have no reason to be in cereals except for granola
• 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 and/or seed oils like canola or sunflower. Butterfly bakery sweetens with maple syrup and uses coconut oil. The following granolas we do not reccomend include:

• Cascadian Farm Organic Granola
• HempYeah! 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.

---