All this money, time and effort in an attempt to market new low sugar cereals, these are the same company’s who: 1. Have been marketing their product as part of a balanced breakfast for decades, and 2. Continued increasing the amount of sugar while actively lobbying against any attempts to regulate marketing their sugary products to kids.
Here is an idea...get rid of the sugary cereals and sugary milk entirely and feed your kids bacon and eggs for breakfast, with water.
You want them to get a heart attack instead? Lots of cultures have good breakfast that don't rely on sugar or cholesterol. Look to the Mediterranean/Middle East/Central Asia/Far East.
It took me a long time to realise that milk was sugary. I'd grown up worrying about the fat content of milk, but all milk, whether full fat or skimmed, has like 5g of sugar per 100ml, a pretty similar sugar content to Gatorade.
We know milk has lactose but we don't usually think of lactose as a sugar like we do with sucrose or fructose.
Of course, the cereals without added sugar have always existed - plain Cheerios, plain corn flakes, plain Rice Krispies, etc.
Sure, they’re processed grains, and you’re eating them with milk, but it’s still a massive improvement over downing some Cinnamon Toast Crunch with a Pop Tart on the side.
The marketing reality is a big problem. We can’t keep with the status quo of kid’s TV channels filled with ads for sugar. It’s no different than having TV ads for cigarettes touting their benefits to your lifestyle and enjoyment.
A lot of parents think these foods are fine because the commercial said so. The reality is that it’s really no more difficult for a busy parent to serve some oatmeal with fruit or something of that sort.
I love the idea of having bacon and eggs for breakfast in the morning. The reality is though that bacon and eggs take time and effort while pouring a bowl of cereal is quick and easy.
The vast majority of cereals simply are not food. They are a treat.
At most, perhaps some porridge with fruit for sweetness.
Even the unsweetened stuff like corn flakes - sure, it has less refined sugar, but you're basically eating cardboard. Get some real green vegetables in you!
I noticed in the US the milk seemed a lot sweeter than what I'm used to. Then again I'm all about Museli and mainly eaten with soya milk, seems reasonably healthy and quick and easy.
Bacon contains nitrates that have been proven to cause cancer. I believe the increased cancer rate is very low however. Also, "nitrate free" bacon usually contains nitrates in a different form (celery powder), which i've read actually contains more nitrates than typical and therefore is actually way worse. I would stick with eggs, with oatmeal, sweetened with some berries.
Bacon and eggs are absolute garbage. Bacon and other processed red meat has been implicated in cancer[1], eggs are overloaded with cholesterol and have also been associated with arterial plaque [2]. This doesn't even get into the massive animal ethics issues and global warming issues that animal agriculture causes. What about oatmeal with fruit, flax, and peanut butter - now there's a concept. (And really better yet? - no breakfast. I recommend intermittent fasting or "IF" as it's usually called.)
I wonder if we're approaching the point of recognizing sugar addiction as a real thing.
Just watch a number of children and you'll see, even from a young age, a wide variety of reactions to sugar.
For example, one I cna think of has always (and continues to be) "sensible" with sugar. Like if she has a soda, she'll stop when she's had enough. If there are chocolates there she'll have one or two.
One of her sisters just can't help herself. She literally can't stop eating any chocolates that are available. If she gets a soda, she'll literally inhale it and then try and drink her sisters' sodas.
Having seen this from such a young age I can't help but think that there's just luck involved here as in some people have a genetic predisposition to what I can only call sugar addiction.
What probably mitigated this in the past was that foods were lower sugar and sugary food and drinks were less available to many people. Like I'm just comparing what I had in the house growing up compared to what I see in pantries now.
But yes, cereal is pretty much universally terrible but it is convenient.
It’s interesting that you attribute a difference among sisters to genes. Sisters are similar genetically, but cannot occupy the same social space. They cannot occupy the same material space.
My explanation for the difference you observed is that siblings somewhat have non-overlapping coping strategies. If one gets angry, the other is being yelled at. If one eats more than their share, the other eats less. If one is asking people to leave them alone, the other is being left alone.
This creates major difference in subjective experience and coping strategies just by virtue of being socially juxtaposed.
One thing I have been working on recently is cooking, especially from scratch and attempting to keep it healthy. One big thing I have noticed is that a lot of food (once cooked) has a very short shelf life (usually days), and if you have something with few ingredients, it requires quality ingredients.
For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have a significant amount of premade food.
Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective, lesser quality ingredients are needed.
It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is what happens.
Kudos for focusing on cooking. It really changed my life when i started focusing on things like making bread, growing my own vegetables (at least to supplement store-bought), and learning the science and history behind foods/meals. I lost about 10 pounds just by learning how to cook and gaining an understanding of portion control and managing salt/nutrition levels. Also, I'm pretty confident my daycare-enrolled kids are less sick than their classmates who eat out one or more meals daily or are reliant on the bag of chicken nuggets and yellow-weird mac and cheese.
Cooking techniques from tropical areas where food spoil quickly are useful here. It's one of the big reasons that spice is used in Indian cooking for example - historically not for flavour in particular but because food spoils extremely quickly (as in within a day or two) if not spiced.
If the palette suits you, it's something I'd suggest looking into. We prepare foods on the weekend (working parents) and they stay for about a week and a half in the fridge, and you can mix and match the different dishes over the week to break monotony.
There is a reason a large part of "cooking" in the past involved preserving/canning. Pickled food seems to have largely been relegated to cucumbers nowadays. And jellies/jams are used in quantities that wouldn't have made sense in the past. Probably the same for many alcohols. Yes, it was the boiling of the water that made it safe, but I suspect the rest of the process helped it stay safer longer. (Would have to dive in on that claim, as I suspect it is less true for beers than it is other drinks.)
So, yes, it shouldn't be a big surprise that fresh ingredients don't have a longer shelf life. Most of what we do to make things no longer fresh came about precisely because of that. :)
When I've done meal prep, I usually have 1-2 meals that I leave in the fridge, and the rest in the freezer... The ones in the freezer are generally good for a month without freezer burn. I'd presume vacuum sealing would make them better for longer in the freezer. I'll usually pull out meals for the day after tomorrow each day.
After a few meal prep sessions there's usually a bit of variety this way... you have to do a lot the first week, but it gets easier.
These days I've been keeping keto macros and nearly carnivore... mostly meat, eggs, greens. I've cut dairy and nuts as both are easy to over do and I seem to have a very strong response to dairy in particular.
It's also a culture thing. In Japan every supermarket and convenience store sells a lot of high quality fresh food (sushi, onigiri, a lot of different bento) that is meant for same day consumption. This only works because a large part of the population actually buys that kind of food for the same day. The shelfs are mostly empty in the evening. I went home empty handed quite a few times when waiting for the reduced prices one hour before shops close.
As far as profit goes, you have to also keep in mind that wholesale prices are cheaper than low volume, so a restaurant won't pay as much for the exact same cut of beef as you would.
Very grateful to my parents for not allowing me sugar added foods when I was a kid, even though I thought it was so lame and had the worst packed lunch out of my friends. I actually ended up being 300lbs in my late teens early 20s because all I did was IRC all day. That said, it didn't take much effort to get to the 150/160 I am today. I'm not sure if it's correlated but coincidently I can't stand anything sweet as an adult.
> 300lbs...it didn't take much effort to get to the 150/160
Uh, holy crap. Good job. How did you do it?
What are some lunch ideas from your parents for my kids? Serious question lol.
Since tree nuts and things aren't allowed I find nearly all the options in the "kids lunches" section of the store are all carb/sugar heavy, everything from the yogurts -> granola bars -> fruit. About the fattiest/healthiest thing I can think of are milk (still a lot of sugar but better than juice), cheese strings, or I make these celery + cream cheese things (instead of peanut butter, lol). I also found they like a tomato + mini bocconcini salad but by the time they go to eat it the salt has already "liquified" much of the cut tomatoes.
Countries with high sugar consumption levels include the US, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium and the UK.
A more recently published report (some of which uses 2008 data) looks at the consumption of "ultra-processed" foods in 19 countries in Europe. "Ultra-processed" refers to food made in a factory with industrial ingredients and additives invented by food technologists: salty snacks, sugary cereals, industrially-made bread, desserts, ready-meals, reconstituted meats, and sweetened soft drinks
The top European countries for consuming "ultra-processed" foods are: UK, Germany, Ireland and Belgium:
Unpopular opinion because it’s a tired, facile one. Oh, look, someone else watched the opening scene to Idiocracy, too. Let us look down on others together with our common trope! Problem is, it doesn’t really answer any questions or produce any useful new models. It was good for a laugh ten years ago, though.
Here’s something that’ll bake your noodle: what if you’re not as clever as you think you are, and due to the DunkinDonuts-Keurig effect, you don’t know you’re one of the stupid ones?
What an insane oversimplification. Look around, the tech industry is filled with incredibly smart people that don't take care of their bodies.
Overcoming bad lifestyle habits is a challenge for many, especially those who inherited those habits as children. But we can absolutely do better than "fat == stupid".
Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Failing to exercise such caution may hamper scientific progress by allowing for the proliferation of potentially false results [… which may lead to] incorrect perceptions about the state of knowledge in the field, especially knowledge concerning genetic variants that have been described as “genes for” traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance.[0][1]
This is just code for poor people and if it is true it is because they can't afford (and/or don't have access to) fresh fruits, vegetables and quality meats.
I'm sure anyone born from anyone is capable of learning about sugar. The sugar industry should at least be partially blamed considering how hard they try to make it look like sugar is not a problem. Also making it more confusing for the consumer by labeling it different things.
[+] [-] will_brown|7 years ago|reply
Here is an idea...get rid of the sugary cereals and sugary milk entirely and feed your kids bacon and eggs for breakfast, with water.
[+] [-] z_open|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ariehkovler|7 years ago|reply
It took me a long time to realise that milk was sugary. I'd grown up worrying about the fat content of milk, but all milk, whether full fat or skimmed, has like 5g of sugar per 100ml, a pretty similar sugar content to Gatorade.
We know milk has lactose but we don't usually think of lactose as a sugar like we do with sucrose or fructose.
[+] [-] dangus|7 years ago|reply
Sure, they’re processed grains, and you’re eating them with milk, but it’s still a massive improvement over downing some Cinnamon Toast Crunch with a Pop Tart on the side.
The marketing reality is a big problem. We can’t keep with the status quo of kid’s TV channels filled with ads for sugar. It’s no different than having TV ads for cigarettes touting their benefits to your lifestyle and enjoyment.
A lot of parents think these foods are fine because the commercial said so. The reality is that it’s really no more difficult for a busy parent to serve some oatmeal with fruit or something of that sort.
[+] [-] flareback|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esotericn|7 years ago|reply
The vast majority of cereals simply are not food. They are a treat.
At most, perhaps some porridge with fruit for sweetness.
Even the unsweetened stuff like corn flakes - sure, it has less refined sugar, but you're basically eating cardboard. Get some real green vegetables in you!
[+] [-] Accacin|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] helo1252|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SmellyGeekBoy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malkia|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] farresito|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArrayList|7 years ago|reply
[1] http://pcrm.org/health/cancer-resources/diet-cancer/facts/ba...
[2] https://nutritionfacts.org/2015/08/20/what-do-eggs-do-to-our...
[+] [-] cletus|7 years ago|reply
Just watch a number of children and you'll see, even from a young age, a wide variety of reactions to sugar.
For example, one I cna think of has always (and continues to be) "sensible" with sugar. Like if she has a soda, she'll stop when she's had enough. If there are chocolates there she'll have one or two.
One of her sisters just can't help herself. She literally can't stop eating any chocolates that are available. If she gets a soda, she'll literally inhale it and then try and drink her sisters' sodas.
Having seen this from such a young age I can't help but think that there's just luck involved here as in some people have a genetic predisposition to what I can only call sugar addiction.
What probably mitigated this in the past was that foods were lower sugar and sugary food and drinks were less available to many people. Like I'm just comparing what I had in the house growing up compared to what I see in pantries now.
But yes, cereal is pretty much universally terrible but it is convenient.
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|7 years ago|reply
My explanation for the difference you observed is that siblings somewhat have non-overlapping coping strategies. If one gets angry, the other is being yelled at. If one eats more than their share, the other eats less. If one is asking people to leave them alone, the other is being left alone.
This creates major difference in subjective experience and coping strategies just by virtue of being socially juxtaposed.
[+] [-] kop316|7 years ago|reply
For prepackaged/premade foods, one would want food to stay good for longer than days once cooked/made, so it can be transported to a store, kept at a store for a while, purchased, stored at a home until eaten. Or even at a restaurant/fast food place, the same thing applies. A lot of those places have a significant amount of premade food.
Applying that same concept for profit, if the food is to be cost effective, lesser quality ingredients are needed.
It seems that to have the food be cheap and stay good for a while, this is what happens.
[+] [-] mholmes680|7 years ago|reply
check out these youtube channels for some motivation (which i've picked up here on HN): https://www.youtube.com/user/BrothersGreenEats, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPzFLpOblZEaIx2lpym1l1A. Also, I recently fell upon Alton Brown's new Good Eats Reboot... good stuff.
[+] [-] kannanvijayan|7 years ago|reply
If the palette suits you, it's something I'd suggest looking into. We prepare foods on the weekend (working parents) and they stay for about a week and a half in the fridge, and you can mix and match the different dishes over the week to break monotony.
[+] [-] taeric|7 years ago|reply
So, yes, it shouldn't be a big surprise that fresh ingredients don't have a longer shelf life. Most of what we do to make things no longer fresh came about precisely because of that. :)
[+] [-] tracker1|7 years ago|reply
After a few meal prep sessions there's usually a bit of variety this way... you have to do a lot the first week, but it gets easier.
These days I've been keeping keto macros and nearly carnivore... mostly meat, eggs, greens. I've cut dairy and nuts as both are easy to over do and I seem to have a very strong response to dairy in particular.
[+] [-] ascar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FreeFull|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crescentfresh|7 years ago|reply
Uh, holy crap. Good job. How did you do it?
What are some lunch ideas from your parents for my kids? Serious question lol.
Since tree nuts and things aren't allowed I find nearly all the options in the "kids lunches" section of the store are all carb/sugar heavy, everything from the yogurts -> granola bars -> fruit. About the fattiest/healthiest thing I can think of are milk (still a lot of sugar but better than juice), cheese strings, or I make these celery + cream cheese things (instead of peanut butter, lol). I also found they like a tomato + mini bocconcini salad but by the time they go to eat it the salt has already "liquified" much of the cut tomatoes.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mikewhy|7 years ago|reply
I went on to work in a bulk candy store, and usually have some bag of candy nearby.
[+] [-] cirrus-clouds|7 years ago|reply
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/05/where...
Countries with high sugar consumption levels include the US, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, Australia, Belgium and the UK.
A more recently published report (some of which uses 2008 data) looks at the consumption of "ultra-processed" foods in 19 countries in Europe. "Ultra-processed" refers to food made in a factory with industrial ingredients and additives invented by food technologists: salty snacks, sugary cereals, industrially-made bread, desserts, ready-meals, reconstituted meats, and sweetened soft drinks
The top European countries for consuming "ultra-processed" foods are: UK, Germany, Ireland and Belgium:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/02/ultra-proces...
[+] [-] pessimizer|7 years ago|reply
Average 51-year-old has read 4 years' worth of books
[+] [-] oblib|7 years ago|reply
That's significant.
[+] [-] MistahKoala|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgoewert|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mikestew|7 years ago|reply
Here’s something that’ll bake your noodle: what if you’re not as clever as you think you are, and due to the DunkinDonuts-Keurig effect, you don’t know you’re one of the stupid ones?
[+] [-] save_ferris|7 years ago|reply
Overcoming bad lifestyle habits is a challenge for many, especially those who inherited those habits as children. But we can absolutely do better than "fat == stupid".
[+] [-] hobs|7 years ago|reply
[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761143552...
[1]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/intelligence-is-inherited-...
Not just unpopular, not supported by science.
[+] [-] snarf21|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izzydata|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]