In the grocery story the other day, I noticed Kit Kat cereal on the shelf. Who would buy that and consider it an even remotely nutritious meal, I don’t know.

You don’t buy it for nutrition. You buy it because it’s delicious and turns the milk into chocolate milk.

Have people forgotten that sugar is literally a nutrient?

As a part of a balanced diet, yes.

In the quantities we're all taking about, it's hard to say these "breakfasts" are positively contributing though.

> As a part of a balanced diet, yes.

It's a nutrient. This is an enumerable set of chemicals. Balancing nutrition is a different matter entirely.

> In the quantities we're all taking about, it's hard to say these "breakfasts" are positively contributing though.

I eat sugary cereals every morning, and it's about half my daily sugar consumption. I don't see any problem with it—I don't have diabetes, I have a healthy weight, etc. The idea that foods are somehow inherently bad because they're sugary is ridiculous. It's the eating habits that are unhealthy, not the food. Sugar isn't rat poison ffs.

I'm guessing rat poison in low enough quantities probably isn't rat poison either.

The problem is to some people sugar is also more addictive than alcohol or their favorite recreational drug. I'm going out on a limb and guessing rat poison isn't as addictive to rats.

> The problem is to some people sugar is also more addictive than alcohol or their favorite recreational drug.

That's not a sugar problem, that's a consumption problem. It's also a necessary nutrient to function, so it's addictive somewhat by definition, like water is addictive, or oxygen is.

This is taking the argument to extreme limits, you have to admit? I'm aware of no widespread instances of people self-reporting craving more oxygen than they need to function. There's probably a reason why there isn't an equally prevalent term like "sweet tooth" for many of the other daily required nutrients. It's probably because there aren't that many nutrients that illict an addiction that causes excessive consumption of said nutrient in a single day.

> This is taking the argument to extreme limits, you have to admit?

So is classifying foods as "unhealthy" or "healthy" but people do that all the time.

Warfarin is a particularly good example of the dose making the poison, as it is both a rat poison and a common prescription medication for people who are at risk of blood clots. An anticoagulant can be a useful medication, but taking too much is dangerous.

That's rather my point—it's not the chemical itself but rather the rate of consumption that is the issue.

type and how you consume sugar matters. HFCS is really really bad for you or consuming sugars in fruits with fiber lowers the insulin spike and absorption rate.

https://youtu.be/dBnniua6-oM?si=1_OBYqk6vmQl4N5K

So I’m sorry but some sugary foods ARE inherently bad and sugary cereals are one of them and that’s not even getting into the addiction side of it and how marketing them to kids sets many up for obesity and chronic diseases

Btw you can also be “skinny fat” from sugars

I don't deny this at all, but this still requires context to determine "health". I truly resent the conception that sugar is somehow a toxin and not a necessary nutrient.

I also don't want to truly deny the addictive nature of sugar. It can have enormously negative effects on peoples lives. The answer is not to reject sugar, though! It is to moderate sugar intake.

The thing about addiction and the way pure sugar acts on some people is they cannot moderate- especially when the addiction is formed at a young age

People who start smoking before their 20s have a much MUCH harder time quitting.

Sure, but nicotine can be completely eliminated from a diet. Sugar cannot be. The idea of rejecting sugar as unhealthy is beyond absurd.

added sugar IS unhealthy. Too much nature sugar IS unhealthy. acting like its not is silly.

Sugar is a toxin that we can derive caloric nutrition from. It would be like reminding people that alcohol is a nutrient.

Sugar is a subset of carbohydrates which is a macronutrient. But you don't need sugar specifically if you want carbs and in fact it is a bad carbo alternative unless you are doing some vigorous activity and need a little boost.

Personally though I eat a lot of it myself. Ideally I would only get maybe 15 grams of sugar a day, tops.

> But you don't need sugar specifically if you want carbs

That's what carbs are. Carbs are sugars. I don't see many people out here living off formaldehyde. If you eat bread, it's metabolized into sugars. If you eat potatoes, these are metabolized into sugars. I don't get the point.

“Sugar” is sucrose, which is fructose and glucose. We can use glucose as a nutrient… fructose is debatable.

“Sugars” covers a wide variety of more complex chemicals, from maltose to lactose.

> sugar is literally a nutrient?

so is iron, selenium, fats, proteins etc. dosage makes the poison.

consider that in nature, the only way to get anything nearly as sugar dense as sugar was to invade the nests of territorial colonies of venemous wasp like insects. getting a spoon full of sugar took guts and commitment!

> so is iron, selenium, fats, proteins etc. dosage makes the poison.

Sure, but since when has "nutritious" meant "not poisonous"? It means "full of nutrients".

> Who would buy that and consider it an even remotely nutritious meal, I don’t know.

While I wouldn’t consider it nutritious, my kids have definitely gotten me to impulse purchase them lots of these goofy cereals like Reese’s puffs and Icee cereal. Almost always they try them and say they are disgusting and want to go back to the classics: Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Fruity Pebbles etc.

I've gotta say your comment really fooled me there. They way you started and ended was not at all where I thought you were heading.

Unless it was sarcasm, then kudos - becauaw I did actually laugh aloud at that twist ending.

I’m very active and I still avoid them. It takes barely more effort to make some scrambled eggs and toast/eggos for the same calories as a bowl of sugary grain and tastes better too.

> It takes barely more effort to make some scrambled eggs and toast/eggos

Making scrambled eggs isn't all that hard but surely you see that pouring some cereal and milk in a bowl is a fraction of the effort, even if the absolute difference isn't that huge?

if you're a psychopath like me, you can microwave scrambled eggs. takes about a minute.

The difference in effort is not appreciable enough for me to consider it if I have the time to sit down and eat at the table anyways.

The only time I would be concerned would be if I was pressed for time - in which case I’d be looking for something like a granola bar or protein shake over cereal.

Are standard cheerios really that unhealthy? They’re easy - 3 cups (two servings) with some almond milk is only 315 calories and they’re packed with fortified vitamins. Three cups is also a lot.

It’s a pretty convenient food.

Sure the super sugary ones aren’t great for you, but generally I like cereals and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries).

Depends on what the rest of your diet looks like, yea 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.

If the rest of your day is high protein, and you have a good macro nutrient count, I guess it’s fine.

If you’re in a time crunch (heh) you can always skip breakfast? A lot of my peers have started doing that (out of laziness) and we are all fine.

There’s a product called magic spoons that does keto* cereal. They’re a lot more expensive, and they stick to your teeth a little. But I liked them when I had them. Food for thought (heh).

Edit: autocorrect

Not everyone needs to be doing keto (especially if you’re active and doing cardio) - though getting protein in your diet I think is one of the few things that’s generally agreed to be good (I just use whey powder shakes as a vegetarian).

I do often skip breakfast also, but will typically have cheerios as my first food around 1pm or so.

There’s just so much snake oil nonsense with nutrition information that I’m highly skeptical of most claims.

You're right to be skeptical. There's a lot of agendas, signalling, contrarianism, and ignorance involved in the area of nutrition.

Cheerios are perfectly healthy for almost everyone. You don't need to buy an expensive buckwheat quinoa kale macadamia nut SuperFood(tm)

A lot of the anti-carb stuff is from people who think eating meat all the time is best and don't want to hear different. Even if you (falsely) believed your ancestors were mainly hunters, that doesn't mean they were eating only supermarket steaks made of muscle tissue. They would've been eating all the tissues. Organ meats. Bon apetite.

Cereals can be healthy, but Cheerios are a refined form which is obviously sub-optimal. If you want a carbohydrate rich breakfast, a fiber-rich alternative like steel cut oats provides superior benefits.

Agreed. But if I were to rank Cheerios, they would rank quite high. No added sugar or sweeteners. Important vitamin fortifications. No fillers or other bad stuff. And oats aren't bad in terms of glycemic load and aren't a common allergen. I would give Cheerios either a B+ or A- whereas steel cut oats are like an A

My breakfast consists a cup of coffee (no sugar) since my teens. I'm just not hungry in the morning.

I eat a good breakfast only if I need to do an intense effort, or if I cannot control when I'm going to eat for lunch (business trips can have difficult schedules..).

Dr McDougall suggests 80% of calories should be from complex carbohydrates, and it’s a diet that has worked well for many— especially for diabetics and people with heart / blood pressure problems. I think it’s really hard to know exactly what is good vs bad for any given individual.

The really basic thermodynamic approach of just measuring calories has fallen out of fashion for some reason, but given that both protein and fat just reduce down to carbs and simple sugars after a certain point, it seems to me that the relative differences between them are overrated. Macronutrient ratios probably just don't matter that much as long as you are meeting your essential amino and fatty acid levels, which is extremely easy to do in a developed country.

There are some important and complex considerations with respect to certain things like gut flora, for instance. Or people with particular genes that change how their metabolism works, or their liver enzymes. But nutrition science is primitive and self-contradictory at the moment. We lack the knowledge to provide a personalized medicine approach.

> 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.

Most of what you need in your diet is "empty calories". One must carry on, thermodynamically speaking. Last night at dinner I had ~500 calories of rice, which was barely enough to compensate for an hour of moderate bicycling. If a person't lifestyle is so sedentary that they can't even sink 300 calories of carbs, the problem in that scenario is the inactivity, not the carbs.

> and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries)

Better how?

Growing up. It was all “coco puffs”, “lucky charms”, “Frosted Flakes”. All sugary garbage.

Wish I was never exposed to that junk. Getting off that stuff was 100X harder than cigarettes.

Same here. Took me years trying and failing. What worked for me was a full stop on sugar and avoiding supermarkets, gasoline and train stations at the beginning.

I read recently that sugar is disappearing from the average the kitchen cupboard in the Netherlands. Inspired by this my wife and me ritually disposed our sugar jar that was indeed unused for a long time.

I indeed recently noticed that we still only have a sugar jar for my parents in law. Nobody else’s we know has sugar in their coffee or tea, and we hardly use it for cooking. I do stir fry chicory in honey on occasion btw :). Also sweet soy sauce or oister sauce is still a sugar source. Breakfast of the kids is still boterham with hagelslag sadly. I’m also from the Netherlands btw, if the hagelslag didn’t give it away.

I take great joy in watching Millennials reject the absurdity that we inherited, like buying diamonds, pretending cable news is news and carb loading every single morning before sitting most of the day.

Decadence is only enjoyable in a world where effectively unlimited resources is normalized.

More accurately, everything we learned is a lie.

Diamonds are plentiful and now easy to mass produce; we even accept the reality of blood mines. Mainstream news media is by and large lying to us for their owner’s gains, whether that be politically, economically, or culturally. And finally most of the dietary information the government drilled into us about things like the “food pyramid” was wrong from the beginning and we’re again only just accepting that. Just like how we’re finally accepting that eggs and meats are good for you and that maybe the multi-billion dollar food industry selling us delicious bags of pure calories is evil in every respect.

I remember being in my teens, messing around, asking mom if eggs were good or bad for us this week?

I'm in my 30s now. It turns out it was a lot of BS.

I think "everything we learned is a lie" is also a "lie." The news media seems to be full of people that are very similar to "normal people," like our parents and prior generations, that were and are trying to over-confidently distill certainty from vast and abundant ambiguity, and do so somewhat poorly. It's also amazing how forgiving our societies are, or how readily we escape personal consequences for mild to relatively serious false beliefs, and how slow we are to correct, even in the face of mounting evidence. It sometimes seems that while we may progress in some areas, we regress equally in others, like there's a natural conservation of folly, generation after generation of random walks. Maybe there's something adaptive to gullibility, because it surely hasn't killed off enough to diminish the prevalence. But I agree, every generation seems to confidently crystalize a gestalt of falsehoods, and pass those on to a new generation that are in the midst of over-correcting their own way to a new crystalized gestalt of falsehoods.

news agencies may well be full of real normal people with interests roughly aligned with the common man, but they're owned by strange rich people with interests usually completely at odds with those of the common man. the issue isn't one of accuracy or inaccuracy, or a failure of a valid attempt, it's one varying degrees of success at attempts to do something other than honestly tell you what's happening in the world.

all news agencies larger than a certain size should either be non-profit or publicly-owned

The point is that you only care about discovering these lies when things aren’t going good. When success is effectively trivial, why would anyone act antisocially.

It’s only after we have an obesity epidemic so people start questioning whether our cereals have become candy.

Unsweetened, natural oats with yogurt isn't so energy dense, is full of fiber and proteins, which will guarantee you with 4h+ of satiety.

You can also add fruits and/or peanut butter if you want a bit of variety!

This is the true breakfast of champions indeed. Add some nuts and seeds for even more variety.