

Who knew cereal was so bad for you? - Airpotri
http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/a-cheeseburger-for-breakfast/

======
ghshephard
In the 1930s to 1950s, anything starchy was bad for you (Ask your grandmother)
- In the 1950s - 1980s fat became the new evil. Then it was cholesterol, and
saturated Fats. Then Transfatty Acids. For a small period of time there was a
niche rebellion against all things carbs, and now it looks like we're coming
back against refined sugars (or all things refined white)

After reading a bit of anti-carb propaganda (Taubes) and being drawn into the
"Wow, there are really bad things that you can eat" worldview - I decided to
educate myself, and wget downloaded about 16,000 journal articles from the
American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (They let you do this for $25, with the
only request being that you put a 3 second delay between requests. Some
awk/sed skills required to parse out the URLs, but not much. Totally download
time was 39 hours)

After reading through 40 or 50 of those articles on topics like "metabolism",
"glycolysis", "diabetes", (btw - can anyone recommend a good PDF index tool -
Lucene is really not easy to plug/play install - I ended up using recursive
grep -il on the pdftotext versions to track down docs (very 1993) - but surely
someone has solved the problem of indexing 16,000 PDFs in a directory - google
fu did not yield much, surprisingly) - I realized that I needed to pick up
more education.

Two books I'm making my way through:

    
    
      o Essential Cell Biology, Second Edition - $7+shipping.[1]
      o Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition - $14+Shipping. [2]
     

Plus, the one I really, really want - but used 2004 editions are insanely
expensive, and there has been a lot of useful developments in nutrition and
metabolism since 1999

    
    
      o Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism [3]
    

Thank goodness for a generous "Amazon.com Look Inside" allowance - I've
probably spent about 10+ Hours perusing this book.

My takeaway, after admittedly putting only three or four months into this
topic, is the following:

    
    
      o Very little has been donein the way of double-blinded,
        placebo controlled, rigorous nutrition studies.
    
      o The few that _have_ done these studies, have usually 
        come in with an agenda (Low Fat, Low Cholesterol, Low
        Carb).
    
      o For how important this whole field is, it's amazing 
        that we've invested so little.
    

So yes - most cereal (the exception potentially being anything your Paleo
ancestors would have recognized as cereal) is probably bad for you. I'll go
farther than the OP and say you're probably kidding yourself if you think that
"Corn Flakes" or "Crispy Crunch" is significantly better than "Fruit Loops" -
it might be marginally better, but none of the refined stuff is doing great
things for the western metabolism.

[1] <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081533480X>

[2] <http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0716743396>

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-
Sareen-G...](http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-
Gropper/dp/0495116572)

~~~
r00fus
Regarding your indexing issue, have you tried SOLR (Lucene powered)? I ran the
Blaze VMWare appliance [1], and it worked great for small collection of text-
based pdfs.

[1] <http://susegallery.com/a/Kr7Ayv/blaze-appliance-for-solr>

~~~
ghshephard
I installed, SOLR, of course, but then ran into the challenge of figuring out
how to automatically feed in the PDFs. I'll take a look at the Blaze
implementation - perhaps they've packaged all the components and cookbooked
the installation process. Thanks very much for the pointer.

------
Almaviva
What doesn't seem to be very well appreciated is that starch is chained-
together sugar, and has the same effects on the body, yet doesn't have
anything like the same stigma attached. The body breaks it down into glucose
extremely quickly, starting in the mouth. White bread is very high on the
glycemic index scale.

------
bryanlarsen
It shouldn't be a surprise that `Cascadian Farms Organic Oats and Honey
Granola` has a lot of sugar. Honey is a sugar.

------
gamble
It may surprise people, but the calories in most sugary cereals aimed at
children are almost identical to most adult-oriented cereals.

For example, "Captain Crunch's Peanut Butter Crunch" has 112 kcal for a 27g
serving, [1] while Corn Flakes have 101 kcal for a 28g serving. [2]

What differentiates them is the source of those calories: sugary cereals get
far more of their calories from simple sugars and fat, while adult cereals are
almost all starch.

[1] <http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/breakfast-cereals/1521/2>

[2] <http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/breakfast-cereals/1527/2>

------
bhousel
Cereal really does have a lot more sugar than it needs to have. I have made a
personal rule that I only buy cereals with <10g of sugar per serving
(according to the nutrition facts label). Even that 10g is kind of a lot -
it's about equal to 3 sugar packets that you would get in a restaurant.

Anyway, next time you're at the store, try to buy cereals with <10g of sugar
and see how limiting that is.

~~~
ghshephard
I'm beginning to wonder if there is a nutritional or metabolic difference
between eating a refined cereal ("Corn Flakes", "Special K") vs eating a
cereal with "sugar" added ("Fruit Loops", "Captain Crunch")

Once it hits your digestive system and the respective enzymes (starting in
your mouth), they all start to break down to monosaccharides pretty quickly.
The problem with these refined carbs is they (A) Don't come along with a lot
of the nutrients you would find in leafy greens, natural cereals, and (B) They
are frequently missing a lot of fiber which means they all basically get
digested and hit your bloodstream.

I'd love to see a comparative study on the relative difference (or lack
thereof) between (A) Refined Cereal with Sugar. (B) Refined Cereal zero Sugar
(C) White toast.

My sense is your body basically treats them all the same at the end of the
day, but I'd still love to see the study.

~~~
bhousel
I have only mild hypoglycemia, but I can tell you that my body processes all
of those foods a bit differently.

The studies you're looking for are related to glycemic index, I think..

~~~
ghshephard
Presuming the Glycemic Index of White Flour Bread is the same as White toast:

Glycemic Index Value: (from <http://www.gilisting.com/glycemic-index>)

    
    
      Corn Flakes:  82
      Froot Loops™:   69
      White Flour Bread: 71

~~~
bhousel
Yes, those sound about right. I try not to eat any of those things.

Glycemic Index is really complicated because it can be affected by what else
you eat with the food (like putting milk on cereal), or how you prepare the
food (some people think toasting bread can lower the GI).

You're right that "how much sugar per serving" is an oversimplification - I
just use that as a starting point because most nutrition labels don't list GI.
And even if they did, the number isn't really meaningful except in the context
of everything else in your meal, and whatever else is going on in your body
that day.

------
gronkie
It's why I eat steel cut oatmeal, no sugar.

------
neonscribe
Kashi GoLean: 1 cup/52g, 140kcal, 1g fat, 30g carb, 10g fiber, 6g sugars, 13g
protein.

~~~
aninteger
I like Kashi, but the problem is that the healthy cereals come in much smaller
boxes and are much more expensive.

~~~
anm8tr
It's funny to me that we think nothing of stopping at the gas station and
buying a diet coke for two bucks... But when we need to decide between healthy
food and crap food all of the sudden that two dollars means so much. Oh How
well we have been conditioned by advertising.

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guylhem
Filled with sugar, sure, but gives you a morning sugar high to get ready to be
productive, which to me is a good thing.

Sugar plus a cup of coffee (caffeine high is good too :-) and I'm ready for a
good day of work.

~~~
imjk
That works well if your day ends at 11AM.

------
drdo
Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past 10 years.

------
vertice
i always thought scruples sounded like a breakfast cereal loaded with sugar
and wasted sentiment.

