Who knew cereal was so bad for you?

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...

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.

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..

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

Can't recommend Kashi GoLean highly enough. Pair that with Greek yogurt and you're eating 35g+ of protein for breakfast alone, all with comparably little sugar.

As for the comment about Kashi being too costly, I have a bi-monthly recurring shipment set up on Amazon. With the 15% subscribe and save discount, I pay $2.90 per box and it's shipped right to my door. Not too shabby.