Hacker News Reader

Comment by Loic | Hacker News Reader

This is because in France, in the past 20 years, we completely lost the simple "Müsli". In Germany, we still have them and this is in our family our base breakfast from Monday to Friday. But effectively, in France, I cannot find Müsli without added sugar.

View on HN

I make Müsli in America where it effectively does not exist

Muesli formula: 4 cups grains + 1 1/2 cups nuts/seeds + 1/2 cup dried fruit

Grains: Rolled oats, wheat bran, whole rye, whole barley, sorghum flakes, quinoa flakes, millet puffs, millet flakes.

Nuts/seeds: Sliced almonds, walnuts, cashews, pecans, pistachios, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, chia seeds, poppy seeds, sesame seeds, unsweetened coconut flakes.

Dried fruit: Dried apricots, dried cherries, dried figs, raisins, golden raisins, currants, apple chips.

Yeah it's easy to put together from one's preferred ingredients. But we stopped making it because all the ingredients are expensive.

Be interesting to see how that scores, given that a quarter of it is dried fruit.

Fruit with its fiber is still superior to fruit juice or syrups lacking fiber. Fermenting the fructose in the gut is essential with fiber is essential to neutralizing the fructose.

I do the same in Spain, although stores usually have some without added sugar.

I buy the grains and cook them in an air fryer. Takes about 5 minutes prep and 20 for cooking, then expand them in a tray for cooling. I don’t use dried fruits though

Yum. Interesting, wonder where you are that there is no muesli? I'm in CA and can get muesli at my local Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.

I live on the east coast and have never heard of it.

I live on the east coast also and all the grocery stores near me sell at least one brand of muesli. Walmart even sells muesli.

You have to be a bit careful when picking a brand. All of the stores mentioned here (Walmart, Trader Joes and Whole Foods) carry museli that is loaded with sugar, which it shouldn’t contain.

They generally also carry have options that aren’t just crunchy candy, but be prepared to read a lot of nutrition labels before you find one.

Grains, nuts and dried fruit all contain sugar so muesli will contain some sugar. The key is to not buy muesli with added sugar. Walmart and most of the grocery stores around me sell Bob's Red Mill muesli which doesn't have any added sugar. The grocery store I normally use also sells Alpen brand. I bought some Alpen No Sugar Added muesli there a couple of days ago because it was on sale.

Yeah, you should be careful when picking a brand, but I don't see muesli with loaded sugar at those places. Are you looking at granola? First off, I haven't seen them in my local stores (outside of Bob's Red Mill[1]). Walmart's website also mentions Familia Swiss Muesli Cereal, says "No added sugar" on the front and the nutritional values don't look far off. Trader Joe's also looks comperatble to Bob's Red Mill[2]

[1] https://www.bobsredmill.com/old-country-style-muesli.html

[2] https://www.whatsgoodattraderjoes.com/2021/01/trader-joes-mu...

Weird, not my experience. The Trader Joes version has no added sugars (see here https://traderjoesrants.com/2021/09/19/trader-joes-muesli-ce...) and the Whole Foods brand I see is Bob's Red Mill Muesli which also contains no added sugars (https://www.bobsredmill.com/old-country-style-muesli.html).

It’s a Swiss dish consisting of soaked rolled oats. Raw oatmeal if you will. People usually add fruits to it, and or nuts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muesli

I was going to chime in and say I’ve never heard of this either, but after checking the Wikipedia link I know exactly what this is. Where I am in northwest Iowa, everyone just calls this “overnight oats/oatmeal”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word Muesli before.

overnight oats isn't really the same as musili

Depends on what you take as your baseline. The original Müsli is overnight oats with some added fruit / some nuts.

Ah okay, I just looked at the picture and read the brief description of cold oats left overnight and assumed they’re the same thing. If that’s not the case then I’ve definitely never heard of muesli before today.

I think overnight oats aren’t that far from the original musli, but many people think Müsli is lower-sugar granola which is not the case

Aldi fairly frequently carries it too.

I see it at stop and shop... but i think your recipe looks great!

https://stopandshop.com/product-search/granola%20&%20muesli?...

It exists and you can probably find it. I buy it weekly.

"Bob's Red Mill" is a high end mill that also has a Muesli product in the US that is very good. Wholefoods carries them but your local chain may too (eg HEB does).

You may also have a store brand!

It'll be with the actual cereals like oats, not the sugary boxed stuff usually.

I buy Bob's Red Mill "Old Country Style Muesli" in the US. It is the only one I've found with zero added sugars. Most grocery stores in my area seem to carry it tucked away somewhere.

Your recipe looks nice, but some dried fruit has a bunch of added sugars, so that's something to keep an eye on though.

Was just going to chime in about the same excellent product. The I add in sweet Yoplait yogurt (which I like to call “fruit pudding”). Gotta get that sugar in somehow! :)

I’m eating breakfast, scrolling through HN, eating bob’s Muesli, and someone mentions it :)

Yeah, my local Walmart has Bob's Red Mill Muesli. My local mainstream supermarket has store brand muesli along with other brands including Bob's. It's just not a rare thing at all, don't know what that poster was talking about.

There are multiple brands of Muesli in many large grocery stores everywhere I've tried to buy some. Most don't have any added sugar. This is the first I've heard of it being difficult to find.

> in America where it effectively does not exist

You can find it in Aldi, Lidl, Walmart, or Sprouts.

Thanks for the recipe, though.

You can totally find unsweetened oats in France, just head to the organic department. Carrefour has some pretty ok oats for instance.

Here, the cheapest kind: https://www.carrefour.fr/p/cereales-flocons-d-avoine-carrefo...

Muesli isn’t just plain oats.

Muesli is a mixture which contains CEREALS (e.g. oats, wheat, barley) dried FRUIT (e.g. sultanas, raisins, dates) and NUTS (e.g. almonds, hazelnuts).

Here’s an example of a typical British muesli… https://www.amazon.co.uk/Jordans-Natural-Muesli-Kg-Pack/dp/B...

And here’s the Wikipedia entry… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muesli

What prevents you from buying those separately and mixing them? You can also find nuts and dried fruits.

I buy simple müesli without added sugar in the cheapest Swiss grocery store. Mix it with some yogourt and fruit. Mostly yogourt and the fruit distracts my mind from the cardboard taste. In fact, I don't pretend that the grains are healthy: they are in my yogourt because they are very useful for regularity. I shit like a triceratops afterwards.

While in France, the Müsli I found in supermarkets tasted like crumbled cookies with milk.

Which is a really weird thing to eat for breakfast.

In the Netherlands basic müsli is still popular after many decades. I swapped it for just a handful of nuts with three spoons greek (10% fat) yoghurt plus a double espresso. Super fast and lets me skip lunch. If I add carbs, like with müsli, it would be more difficult to skip lunch.

Even that... isn't great. Certainly step up from "just a bunch of carbohydrates" but not exactly super healthy either.

There is nothing wrong with carbohydrates, it's over consuming them that's the problem. Müsli without added sugar can easily be a part of a well balanced diet. It's basically just a different form of oatmeal.

Carbohydrates are just sugar your body has to work a little bit to unlock first, but they’re just sugar. They’re really not much better for you than raw sugar, they’re just slow dose. They’ll spike your insulin a little less, but ask a diabetic, the overall difference isn’t a ton.

Fiber is a carbohydrate the body can’t digest so you can generally subtract them when figuring, but beyond that carbohydrates alone are just sugar as far as your body is concerned.

Ok. You eat a sugar cereal every morning, and I’ll keep eating my old fashioned old meal with no sugar. Let’s compete weight and A1C in 10 years.

As is everything in biochemistry, the absorption rate sets the response. 5g of sugar that can only be digested over the course of hours is much different than 5g of sugar that can be digested in minutes.

So basically you're advocating for a keto diet for everyone and every time? That's silly. Carbs are not intrinsically bad.

Also, all sugars are carbs but all carbs aren't sugar. Don't take shortcuts.

> Carbs are not intrinsically bad

No, but most people shouldn’t be consuming it as a ritual.

You are definitely not French :-) Food preparation and lunch is a ritual for us.

But, I will also add that in the primary school we had to learn how to balance a diet over a full week. Because you cannot balance on a single day...

But the fiber content makes you feel sated sooner, so you are likely to eat less of it than sugar.

And musli isn't processed as much as other breakfast cereals. We don't know what causes it yet, but there's a clear correlation between eating highly processed foods and obesity.

Where are you getting at? What is the point of your reply?

Carbohydrate intake has many factors including 'speed of processing' which is retarded by the presence of fiber and fat. So while a serving of muesli might 30g of carbohydrates it also will have 5g of fat and fiber and protein, which affects how fast your insulin levels rise and how high the spike.

If muesli were simply a slightly better carb, that would make fruit the same. The fiber and more complex sugars are what make you feel fuller and glucose levels less volatile.

You might be confused about what musli is..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com