Fortified cereal?
neekmichelle922
Posts: 71 Member
Is things like Cheerios & Special K bad? I know what they say about the sugar and everything but they DO have a lot of vitamins & being a vegetarian it helps! Are they that bad !?
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Replies
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To the extent they aren't Lucky Charms they are bad but, hey, not every cereal can be Lucky Charms.
ETA: You'd have a really hard time finding another type of food that provides so many vitamins and minerals relative to the calories it has.0 -
if they fit in your calories, no they aren't bad
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Because protein, fat and fiber are filling, I look for the most bang for my calorie buck with cereal.
Special K (original) has decent protein numbers. Add some 1 or 2% milk and a piece of fruit, and you have all 3 components. I typically don't buy Cheerios....not filling enough.
Kashi Go Lean (original) has both protein and fiber. I like to stir that into yogurt with a few chopped nuts.0 -
While I wouldn't stick them in the "Most Healthy" column of foods, I wouldn't stick them anywhere near "Least Healthy," either.
Some of the cereals have iron and good amounts of fiber and a variety of other vitamins and minerals without being sugar bombs.
You have to compare the food to your needs and make a decision about whether it will do you good. I have issues with iron and include breakfast cereals for that reason. I don't eat a ton, but I have some. I need the freaking iron and I'd rather have a breakfast cereal than red meat.
You have to figure out what is best for you.
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Aren't most breakfast cereals fortified? I know all the ones for kids are because the company wants to make the parents feel good that the kids are getting nutrition, despite the large amounts of sugar. So, the only think I would watch is the sugar content. Just make sure it fits your daily goals and you should be fine.0
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"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Given a choice of Special K vs Lucky Charms, I'd say this is a false choice and have eggs. Or rolled oats if my food ethics prohibited me from eating eggs. And pay a LOT less.0 -
Bob's Red Mill Organic Rolled Oats versus (Lucky Charms) macros and micros as percentage of default RDAkshama2001 wrote: »"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Given a choice of Special K vs Lucky Charms, I'd say this is a false choice and have eggs. Or rolled oats if my food ethics prohibited me from eating eggs. And pay a LOT less.
Serving Size: 48g (54g)
190 calories (220)
3.5g of fat (2g)
32g of carbs (44)
7g of protein (4)
Vitamin A 0% (20%)
Vitamin C 0% (20%)
Calcium - (20%)
Iron 15% (50%)
Vitamin D - (20%)
Thiamin - (50%)
Riboflavin - (50%)
Niacin - (50%)
Vitamin B6 - (50%)
Folic Acid - (100%)
Vitamin B12 - (50%)
Phosphorous - (8%)
Magnesium - (8%)
Zinc - (50%)
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Dysfunctional Foods | Like lipstick on a pig: why fortified junk foods can't change junk
One of the disquieting trends in modern nutrition—and frankly, there are quite a few—is the contention that fortification makes any food a good food.
A time-honored example is breakfast cereal. Who hasn't heard a sonorous announcer conclude a television commercial by declaring that some kids' cereal that would otherwise seem a lot like a bowl full of jelly beans is "fortified with 11 essential vitamins and minerals—part of a complete breakfast!"
[See Children's Cereal: Healthy Start or Junk Food?]
They tend not to mention that it can be a very dubious part of a complete breakfast. Nor do they tend to specify in what way it's complete.
...General Mills' Total cereal, famously, offers 100 percent of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for a whole list of nutrients. But that's not because any of the ingredients in Total is an exceptional source of intrinsic nutrition. It's because a veritable multivitamin is thrown into the recipe. True, the first ingredient is whole wheat—but the second is sugar. There are more grams of sugar than of fiber, and a fair amount of added salt as well. That's quite a lot of baggage for the delivery vehicle of a multivitamin.
If you want to take a multivitamin, skip the middleman and take one. And then go ahead and have a totally wholesome breakfast. (For what it's worth, my standard fare is a mix of berries and other diced fruits, Nature's Path whole-grain cereals or oatmeal and non-fat, organic, plain Greek yogurt.)
[See 6 Convenience Foods You Can Make Yourself.]
And so it is that we have long been, at best, flaky about functionally enhancing foods. We should resist the devolution of this concept where credit card meets cash register. If a food lacks native nutrition, nutrient additions can't fix it. If nutrient additions don't perform a function that can be defined and measured, they cannot reasonably be deemed "functional."
There is no meaningful evidence that random nutrient additions to soft drinks and sugary cereals are doing us any good, or compensating for the native liabilities of such foods. The food industry might like to get away with the implied claim that enough nutrients at the end of a long ingredient list of junk confer a salutary glow. But let's not buy this unsubstantiated baloney. Doing so would be, in a word, dysfunctional.
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kshama2001 wrote: »"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Given a choice of Special K vs Lucky Charms, I'd say this is a false choice and have eggs. Or rolled oats if my food ethics prohibited me from eating eggs. And pay a LOT less.
Eggs and oats =/= cereal. :noway: Also, I've actually bought cereal for WAY LESS than a dozen of eggs lately.
OP, as long as cereal fits into your daily calories, you can have cereal from something as delicious as Lucky Charms to something as delicious as Raisin Bran.
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I'm not sure that an argument that there's the equivalent of a multivitamin in the cereal really supports your assertion that "most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in." Do you think it does?0
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Eating eggs or oatmeal instead of cereal when I'm wanting cereal doesn't help me. Then, I'm full of eggs and still wanting cereal. So I'd rather work it into my day then spend the day craving something. I'll stick to my Marshmallow Maties, thanks. (generic Lucky Charms, the marshmallows are so much better!)0
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DeguelloTex wrote: »I'm not sure that an argument that there's the equivalent of a multivitamin in the cereal really supports your assertion that "most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in." Do you think it does?
pill or delicious cereal. pill I can't keep down, and cereal is a crunchy, wonderful food.0 -
DeguelloTex wrote: »
Bob's Red Mill Organic Rolled Oats versus (Lucky Charms) macros and micros as percentage of default RDAkshama2001 wrote: »"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Given a choice of Special K vs Lucky Charms, I'd say this is a false choice and have eggs. Or rolled oats if my food ethics prohibited me from eating eggs. And pay a LOT less.
Serving Size: 48g (54g)
190 calories (220)
3.5g of fat (2g)
32g of carbs (44)
7g of protein (4)
Vitamin A 0% (20%)
Vitamin C 0% (20%)
Calcium - (20%)
Iron 15% (50%)
Vitamin D - (20%)
Thiamin - (50%)
Riboflavin - (50%)
Niacin - (50%)
Vitamin B6 - (50%)
Folic Acid - (100%)
Vitamin B12 - (50%)
Phosphorous - (8%)
Magnesium - (8%)
Zinc - (50%)
Paragraphs I didn't include from the above article are relevant here:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2013/04/01/dysfunctional-foods
...For one thing, there is no evidence that such nutrient additions are doing us any good. We know far more about the benefits of nutrient-dense foods in harmonious combinations than we do about nutrients in isolation. Foods rich in antioxidants, for instance, are consistently associated with beneficial health effects. Studies of isolated antioxidant nutrients have consistently disappointed.
...And finally, nutrients native to foods are in native company. It's quite likely that some of the beneficial effects of nutrients pertain to the company they keep, just as the charms of an orchestra depend on the contribution of individual instruments to the melodious whole. In our random dispersion of nutrients across the food supply, we are much at risk of unmaking the music.0 -
So, tell me, is the iron in the rolled oats doing us any good but the iron in the Lucky Charms isn't?kshama2001 wrote: »DeguelloTex wrote: »
Bob's Red Mill Organic Rolled Oats versus (Lucky Charms) macros and micros as percentage of default RDAkshama2001 wrote: »"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Given a choice of Special K vs Lucky Charms, I'd say this is a false choice and have eggs. Or rolled oats if my food ethics prohibited me from eating eggs. And pay a LOT less.
Serving Size: 48g (54g)
190 calories (220)
3.5g of fat (2g)
32g of carbs (44)
7g of protein (4)
Vitamin A 0% (20%)
Vitamin C 0% (20%)
Calcium - (20%)
Iron 15% (50%)
Vitamin D - (20%)
Thiamin - (50%)
Riboflavin - (50%)
Niacin - (50%)
Vitamin B6 - (50%)
Folic Acid - (100%)
Vitamin B12 - (50%)
Phosphorous - (8%)
Magnesium - (8%)
Zinc - (50%)
Paragraphs I didn't include from the above article are relevant here:
http://health.usnews.com/health-news/blogs/eat-run/2013/04/01/dysfunctional-foods
...For one thing, there is no evidence that such nutrient additions are doing us any good. We know far more about the benefits of nutrient-dense foods in harmonious combinations than we do about nutrients in isolation. Foods rich in antioxidants, for instance, are consistently associated with beneficial health effects. Studies of isolated antioxidant nutrients have consistently disappointed.
...And finally, nutrients native to foods are in native company. It's quite likely that some of the beneficial effects of nutrients pertain to the company they keep, just as the charms of an orchestra depend on the contribution of individual instruments to the melodious whole. In our random dispersion of nutrients across the food supply, we are much at risk of unmaking the music.
Your last paragraph is just woo gibberish.
ETA: It's also pretty slick how the author moves from an evidence-based standard when discussing nutrient additions to the "quite likely" standard when defending his/her preferred option. Well, maybe "laughable" more than "slick," but you get the idea.
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Try to stick with cereals that are 100% whole grain and don't have anything you don't care to eat, like sugar. Or forgo boxed cereals altogether and cook yourself a pot of whole grains and take a scoop for breakfast. Add fruit and nuts and fat free dairy.0
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Unhappy Meals
...Processing foods depletes them of many nutrients, a few of which are then added back in through “fortification”: folic acid in refined flour, vitamins and minerals in breakfast cereal. But food scientists can add back only the nutrients food scientists recognize as important. What are they overlooking?
Simplification has occurred at the level of species diversity, too. The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them. Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.
From Leaves to Seeds. It’s no coincidence that most of the plants we have come to rely on are grains; these crops are exceptionally efficient at transforming sunlight into macronutrients — carbs, fats and proteins. These macronutrients in turn can be profitably transformed into animal protein (by feeding them to animals) and processed foods of every description. Also, the fact that grains are durable seeds that can be stored for long periods means they can function as commodities as well as food, making these plants particularly well suited to the needs of industrial capitalism.
The needs of the human eater are another matter. An oversupply of macronutrients, as we now have, itself represents a serious threat to our health, as evidenced by soaring rates of obesity and diabetes. But the undersupply of micronutrients may constitute a threat just as serious. Put in the simplest terms, we’re eating a lot more seeds and a lot fewer leaves, a tectonic dietary shift the full implications of which we are just beginning to glimpse. If I may borrow the nutritionist’s reductionist vocabulary for a moment, there are a host of critical micronutrients that are harder to get from a diet of refined seeds than from a diet of leaves. There are the antioxidants and all the other newly discovered phytochemicals (remember that sprig of thyme?); there is the fiber, and then there are the healthy omega-3 fats found in leafy green plants, which may turn out to be most important benefit of all.
Most people associate omega-3 fatty acids with fish, but fish get them from green plants (specifically algae), which is where they all originate. Plant leaves produce these essential fatty acids (“essential” because our bodies can’t produce them on their own) as part of photosynthesis. Seeds contain more of another essential fatty acid: omega-6. Without delving too deeply into the biochemistry, the two fats perform very different functions, in the plant as well as the plant eater. Omega-3s appear to play an important role in neurological development and processing, the permeability of cell walls, the metabolism of glucose and the calming of inflammation. Omega-6s are involved in fat storage (which is what they do for the plant), the rigidity of cell walls, clotting and the inflammation response. (Think of omega-3s as fleet and flexible, omega-6s as sturdy and slow.) Since the two lipids compete with each other for the attention of important enzymes, the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s may matter more than the absolute quantity of either fat. Thus too much omega-6 may be just as much a problem as too little omega-3.
And that might well be a problem for people eating a Western diet. As we’ve shifted from leaves to seeds, the ratio of omega-6s to omega-3s in our bodies has shifted, too. At the same time, modern food-production practices have further diminished the omega-3s in our diet. Omega-3s, being less stable than omega-6s, spoil more readily, so we have selected for plants that produce fewer of them; further, when we partly hydrogenate oils to render them more stable, omega-3s are eliminated. Industrial meat, raised on seeds rather than leaves, has fewer omega-3s and more omega-6s than preindustrial meat used to have. And official dietary advice since the 1970s has promoted the consumption of polyunsaturated vegetable oils, most of which are high in omega-6s (corn and soy, especially). Thus, without realizing what we were doing, we significantly altered the ratio of these two essential fats in our diets and bodies, with the result that the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 in the typical American today stands at more than 10 to 1; before the widespread introduction of seed oils at the turn of the last century, it was closer to 1 to 1.
The role of these lipids is not completely understood, but many researchers say that these historically low levels of omega-3 (or, conversely, high levels of omega-6) bear responsibility for many of the chronic diseases associated with the Western diet, especially heart disease and diabetes. (Some researchers implicate omega-3 deficiency in rising rates of depression and learning disabilities as well.) To remedy this deficiency, nutritionism classically argues for taking omega-3 supplements or fortifying food products, but because of the complex, competitive relationship between omega-3 and omega-6, adding more omega-3s to the diet may not do much good unless you also reduce your intake of omega-6.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/magazine/28nutritionism.t.html0 -
Did you miss the "iron in the rolled oats vs. iron in the Lucky Charms" question?0 -
kshama2001 wrote: »"Fortified" is a marketing euphemism that means most of the good stuff was stripped out and a fraction of them put back in.
Nope, that's "enriching." Fortifying is adding in nutrients that wouldn't be there otherwise.
And even with enriching it's more complicated, since this is often done with products (like white rice) where the less processed version has more nutrients but many or most of them aren't actually bioavailable to us. (Which is why brown and white rice aren't really meaningfully different beyond personal preference, despite brown rice's ranking in the health hall of fame among crunchy types.)0 -
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There are no good or bad foods. Different foods have different nutrition profiles. IIFYM and contributes to your daily needs, it can be a valuable addition to your plan.
In the realm of breakfast cereals, Special K and Cheerios tend to be more nutritionally dense and have an average profile distribution, which I would generally classify as better then "kids cereals", but worse that specialty "healthy" brands/types, which are specifically engineered to maximize nutrition density per calorie.
Combine with some fruit and a dairy milk for added protein and fat, and it can be an adequate breakfast.0
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