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Comment by safety1st | Hacker News Reader

I mean as long as you avoid the ones that have a lot of sugar added, eating cereal for breakfast isn't much different from eating pasta for dinner. It's a couple hundred calories worth of carbs which is not so bad in itself.

Where people get into trouble is their overall calorie intake and the breakdown of their macros, it's not uncommon for people to get too many calories from fats or carbs. If you're sedentary you don't really need a lot of calories period. But if you're keeping an eye on all those things a bowl of oatmeal in the morning isn't going to kill you.

Edit: Here's a list of cereals and their nutritional info: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga... Note that at the recommended serving size, obviously some are more healthy than others, but frankly none of them are really going to kill you. A serving of cereal is only about 100-250 calories. The problem arises when you eat multiple servings in one sitting.

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“Breakfast cereal” specifically refers to the sweetened crap. Nobody was advertising plain oatmeal during cartoon breaks

Actually, it doesn't. Cereals can be sweetened or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakfast_cereal

What a weird article, I kept scrolling down looking for the ... breakfast cereal? The only thing they have on there that is what people are actually talking about is frosted flakes. They don't even have plain Cheerios on this list... Am I missing something?

It's a UK website. Cheerios are relatively new here, and my impression is that they aren't very popular. In particular, i suspect they haven't caught on with the demographic of people who write articles for the BHF website.

I'm not sure "relatively new" is accurate, though of course it depends on the timescale. They seemed as widespread as other common sugary cereals (Coco Pops, Frosties, Ricicles et al) during the 90s. However, if we're looking back further, it could well be the case that they were comparatively late arrivals.

Frosted Flakes is representative of the general category that you are calling "breakfast cereal." The items on the list are the different kinds of cereal categories.

I don't think so... The article seemed to be specifically talking about "corn flakes with frosting", which is not comparable to, like, whatever cocoa puffs is.

The category is "high sugar". Not the shape or grain used in the cereal.

I mean, the category is labeled "Sugar-frosted cornflakes" in the article. I see that it compares them to "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals", but it's clearly still talking specifically about sugar-frosted cornflakes in that section. It also puts this higher in the list than granola with dried fruit, and I promise you that granola is healther than the large majority of mainstream mass-market sweetened cereals in the US. (I do get that it's a UK article, and perhaps "suger-frosted cornflakes" and "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals" are the primary sweetened cereals there, but that's not how it is in the US.)

I dunno, I really don't want to be pedantic, I just think you're saying "you shouldn't read what the words in the article say, you should read the words I say it means to say", and that's not how I read...

> I mean, the category is labeled "Sugar-frosted cornflakes" in the article. It also puts this higher in the list than granola with dried fruit, and I promise you that granola is healther than the large majority of mainstream mass-market sweetened cereals in the US. (I do get that it's a UK article, and perhaps "suger-frosted cornflakes" and "other sweetened cereals like chocolate rice cereals, or honey-nut coated cereals" are the primary sweetened cereals there, but that's not how it is in the US.)

Yes, these are the primary sweetened cereals in the UK, but I don't think they're any healthier than the US versions. Frosties seem to be nutritionally equivalent to Lucky Charms just without the off-putting artificial colours.

I think it's simply that the granola is very dense, they list a bowl as 60g vs 30g for the sweetened cereal. I tend to just sprinkle a bit on top of a bowl of yoghurt and fresh fruit.

There are far worse cereals than what we call frosted flakes, is what I found confusing. It is one of the healthier ones! A lot of the cereal in a US cereal aisle is essentially candy. I guess I wouldn't have been confused if the article had a section at a bottom for "all the rest of the super sweet cereals".

> Edit: Here's a list of cereals and their nutritional info: https://www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-maga... Note that at the recommended serving size, obviously some are more healthy than others, but frankly none of them are really going to kill you. A serving of cereal is only about 100-250 calories. The problem arises when you eat multiple servings in one sitting.

As in... eating normal sized breakfast ? Ain't nobody bothering to get the milk out of the fridge for 250 calories breakfast.

It looks like marketing move to look better tbh

2 eggs, 1 serving of cereal with milk, some fruit, black coffee. Boom, a balanced breakfast that includes cereal. You're welcome.

Now obviously telling someone to eat sugary cereal isn't good health advice. But even if you opted for one of the less healthy cereals in my link - frosted cornflakes - one serving only has 11g sugar, 13% of your daily allowance. Not really going to kill you.

Sit down and eat three servings of frosted flakes in one go and yeah you'll slowly kill yourself.

If you're going through the trouble of making eggs you aren't going to bother with cereal - cereal is a convenience food.

There are so many weird takes in this discussion. Obviously what you have said here is untrue, maybe it is your preference but of course it is not universal. Many people make eggs for breakfast and eat them with a single serving of cereal. I'm one of them.

There's very little difficulty in making eggs, two of them in a frying pan, wait, flip, done...

The other weird take was the people who kept saying "cereal" only refers to cereals that are high in sugar. The statement makes zero sense on its face, cereals with sugar are grammatically a subset of cereals...

Cereal in fact refers to a type of grass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cereal But the topic here (literally in the headline) is breakfast cereals, some of those have added sugar, some of which don't.

> I mean as long as you avoid the ones that have a lot of sugar added,

This is virtually all of them, though. I think it’s generally not as bad as it used to be, but it’s still refined sugar for breakfast and really not ideal.

In the list of ten breakfast cereals I posted, four of the first five have essentially zero sugar.

Consumer habits notwithstanding there are many low/no sugar breakfast cereals available at any supermarket, they are usually not the ones targeting kids with cartoon characters and zany names on the box.

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