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Help me understand food nutritional labels
Richy
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So, with my kid growing up and increasingly enjoying cereals for breakfast, I've started paying attention to nutritional labels to make sure I pick the healthiest option. But when I started comparing cereals, what I found made no sense to me. For example:
So, what am I missing here? Because from these values it looks like the sugary kids cereals are healthier than the non-sugary grown-up cereals. That can't be right... right?
- Lucky Charms, which is sugary as hell and contains marshmallows, is listed as 110 calories and 9g of sugar.
- Froot Loops, which are basically rings of sugar, is listed as 110 calories and 10g of sugar.
- Raisan Bran, which are bran with dry raisins, is listed as 135 calories and 10.5g of sugar.
- Harvest Crunch, which is oats and nuts, is listed as 300 calories and 18g of sugar.
So, what am I missing here? Because from these values it looks like the sugary kids cereals are healthier than the non-sugary grown-up cereals. That can't be right... right?
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3/4 cup of a puff rice cereal would weigh more than 1/4 cup of granola.
But all cereal on the cereal isle is essentially cookies and should be thought as such. Your adult versus kid cookies are comparing frosted oatmeal cookies with frosted sugar cookies. That's the real difference.
Does that mean don't let your kids have Lucky Charms? Eh. Maybe sometimes! But cooking an a meal like you would dinner with balanced portions would be the actual healthy way to start the day. Not everyone has the luxury of doing that, though.
Thanks all!
Wait if cereal and eggs and bacon are bad what is the recommended choice? I'm worried you aren't going to say pancakes.
A quick breakfast I do a lot is hummus on bell pepper, or I make a bunch of polenta or couscous with veggies on sunday and pack them for the next few days to microwave once its meal time. Neither are really kid friendly depending on how fussy an eater your kids are. But for grown adult humans with agency I really would recommend literally making a meal like you would a dinner, just half portion. A bit of meat, a bunch of veggies, some fresh grains.
Eggs, depending on how you prepare them, are a great breakfast for (most) people! Drop the butter and just one as soft or hardboiled and there isn't much better than them as far as superfoods (again, for most people. If you are in a colesterol situation things are different obviously). I do enjoy a softboiled egg over rice as hearty winter breakfast every now and then.
That said, I do bagels and hummus or creamcheese regularly as well. And if your kids are getting balanced meals at lunch and dinner and are active, a sugary cereal won't kill them. Its just when everything in your diet is terrible that the problems compound.
You can find cereals with less sugar. Kashi is ok in general and had a few flavors that have very low sugar though it's definitely noticeable and your kid might hate them. I think it was mentioned above, but granola is not great. It's both calorically dense and high sugar which will lead to most people overeating it.
Apparently poached is the second healthiest way to eat them. Just need to be less lazy I guess.
"Lemon Iced Tea" often has almost as much sugar as a can of Coke. 30g of sugar for a given non-large (sub-1 qt) container is not uncommon
For the calorie/protein density, it's hard to beat an egg. Cooking an egg in a good skillet uses a few grams of cooking fat, which is all about the same amount of "unhealthy". Olive oil, canola oil, avacado oil, butter - pick one you like and use a couple of grams of it. Maybe don't float your egg in it or pour it on the egg when you're done (unless you like deliciousness). Most articles I read say use olive oil if you're really aiming for most healthy, but it really sucks to cook with something that smokes at super low temperature.
The biggest problem I have with cereal and bread products isn't that it's got a little sugar for taste, it's that they add sugars as preservatives and to appeal to children in competition with things like donuts and candy.
If you make oatmeal and add a little butter and some vanilla or small amount of granulated sugar or honey, you're at the very least making something way tastier than cereal and probably healthier.
Edit: I'm definitely not a healthy cooking type person or a nutritionist, but when you know the ingredients of something because you measured them yourself it will help. Compared to the tricky measuring and gimmick numbers of prepackaged foods aimed at kids, cigarettes look more ethically marketed.
Two of them in a bowl with some full cream milk and some chopped fruit on top. Your kids will grow up tough as nails. If you want the broad ocker accent to go with, be sure to also serve them a glass of Milo with their Weetbix.
It's actually (assuming granulated sugar) less than that, more like 3.5g. Sugar's super soluble and we really don't realize how much of it ends up in things. I only really realized how much was in stuff when I
1) had to dissolve it in a laboratory, and
2) had to weigh various compounds out in a lab
Take a guess at about how much sugar, by volume, is in a can of coke.
Or you could use a non-stick pan? A decent non-stick pan like a Tefal Titanium is quite alright for anything but large pieces of meat (where you need the heat capacitance of a cast iron skillet or the temperature will drop too much when you put the meat in).
For eggs it's perfectly fine.
As for oils. Be aware that olive oil and avocado oil are the oils most frequently cheated with by unethical food companies and suppliers, leading to a large percentage of these oils being either rancid or diluted with lower quality oils. So if you want olive oil/avocado oil, you want one that's been certified by a reputable organization.
Canola oil tends to be a more certain alternative, and still quite healthy as oils go.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
In addition to the volume and density differences between 3/4 of a cup of Raisin Bran vs Froot Loops already mentioned....
One of the other misleading things here on the labels is the type of sugar. Oats and Raisin Bran have more complex carbohydrates from, well, the bran and oats, which are more calorically dense than simple sugars. In addition, there's different kinds of sugars in the raisins versus the marshmallow, and the added fiber in the raisins.
That being said, the more whole-grain and oat-based cereals you consume, the better you'll be. I disagree a bit that it's completely unhealthy to eat breakfast cereals. High-fiber cereals with little to no added sugar are generally pretty good for you overall. They provide quick energy early on thanks to the raisins (using Raisin bran as an example), and then long-term energy release from the more complicated starches in the bran flakes. In addition the added fiber keeps you from absorbing everything, leading to lower sugar absorption overall compared to something like Lucky Charms.
Oat-based cereals also contain a lot of beta-glucan (oatmeal itself is better, but eh) that helps manage cholesterol levels as well.
So, all this to say, if you're trying to healthily feed your kid cereal, go for oat- or bran-based cereals with dried fruit.
Of course, these aren't the most appealing cereals for children, so I can't help you there if they just scream for Froot Loops.
Funny story, when I was ~10 years old, our family doctor prescribed that I eat sugary cereals in the morning to try and gain weight, so my parents started buying fruit loops and shit. I think that lasted less than a year before I went back to raisin bran on my own choice, cause it tasted better.
Because I don't know anything about Canadian food labeling requirements, but the US food labeling requirements have a wide margin of error. It's kind of... uh... a thing.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Yeah we're on different food distribution networks. We have to, since our labeling has to be in metric and bilingual.
I don't know anything about errors in the food labels, but a quick google says the printed values have to be within 20% of reality, and is checked by Health Canada. How is it in the USA?
Seriously? I can accept your goddamn cups and spoons when you're writing down granny's applepie recipy, but c'mon now.
We have the same 20% requirement. The first problem (which is true regardless of nationality) is that 20% is a lot if you're counting calories for a diet. The second problem (also true regardless of nationality) is that calorie counts are based on average absorption ratios in the human digestive tract - not everybody absorbs nutrients equally efficiently. Most of the time, this works in your favor (if you're trying to limit caloric intake), you're more likely to have lower-than-average absorption than higher-than-average absorption (especially as you get older). But it can still throw off calorie counts by as much as 10%.
The other two problems which might be US-specific are: first, a food packager won't get in trouble for oversupplying, but they could get in trouble for undersupplying. If I sell you a bag labeled 100g of potato chips, and it only contains 90g, I've committed fraud. But if it contains 110g, then you've just gotten free chips. The second problem is that the FDA (like a lot of our federal agencies) is underfunded and understaffed, which means our food industry isn't as well-scrutinized as it should be. Our FDA is in a state of perennial backlog, on all sorts of regulatory matters including but not limited to nutrition labels.
I'm not saying that you should ignore nutritional labels or anything silly like that. Just that my message to any bystanders reading this, especially USians, is that if precise caloric measurements are necessary (say, if you're trying to control a metabolic disease), take nutritional labels with a grain of salt (no pun intended).
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.