Who knew cereal was so bad for you? | Hacker News Reader

Who knew cereal was so bad for you?

theincidentaleconomist.com

15 pointsAirpotri24 comments

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...

Do you intend to write up your interpretation once you are done?

So, the challenge, of course, is that there isn't really any correct answers here. Basically, the deeper you go, the more complex you realize things are. A great science writer like Taubes can write an very respectable and carefully footnoted tome (Good Calories, Bad Calories) describing how dangerous carbs are, but then people can come up with counter-examples of asians who have a predominantly white rice diet who live a long, lean, and healthy life. So then he pivots a little, and now it's _refined_ carbohydrates, in particular the sugars and refined flours that are so common in western diets.

It's a little like summarizing "What is the best way to program" - there isn't any one way. A Sr. Developer has lifetime's experience of tools, languages, methodologies, design patterns, and passion that allows them to make a decision on how to approach a problem given a broad pool of knowledge.

Likewise a Dietitian has a whole host of experience, knowledge, tools, and approaches that may be appropriate for different circumstances. Bodybuilders eat plenty of carbohydrates in their off season to bulk up and put on muscle, switch to low-carb to drop fat as they cut, until they get close to their show date, at which point they start adding carbs back to their diet to gain muscle pump. Same person, same profession, same macro-nutrient - different approach.

It's really about understanding the multitudes of mechanisms than it is about any unified interpretation. As much as I love reading Gary Taubes work (and I do!) - I think he has a tendency to make things a little more simple than they really are.

Sorry, no silver bullet. :-)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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..

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

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.

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

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

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

There is no such thing as a healthy cereal. There are only less unhealthy cereals.

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.

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.

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.

That works well if your day ends at 11AM.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2747/does-giving-sw...

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

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

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