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Comment by gonehome | Hacker News Reader

Are standard cheerios really that unhealthy? They’re easy - 3 cups (two servings) with some almond milk is only 315 calories and they’re packed with fortified vitamins. Three cups is also a lot.

It’s a pretty convenient food.

Sure the super sugary ones aren’t great for you, but generally I like cereals and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries).

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Depends on what the rest of your diet looks like, yea 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.

If the rest of your day is high protein, and you have a good macro nutrient count, I guess it’s fine.

If you’re in a time crunch (heh) you can always skip breakfast? A lot of my peers have started doing that (out of laziness) and we are all fine.

There’s a product called magic spoons that does keto* cereal. They’re a lot more expensive, and they stick to your teeth a little. But I liked them when I had them. Food for thought (heh).

Edit: autocorrect

Not everyone needs to be doing keto (especially if you’re active and doing cardio) - though getting protein in your diet I think is one of the few things that’s generally agreed to be good (I just use whey powder shakes as a vegetarian).

I do often skip breakfast also, but will typically have cheerios as my first food around 1pm or so.

There’s just so much snake oil nonsense with nutrition information that I’m highly skeptical of most claims.

You're right to be skeptical. There's a lot of agendas, signalling, contrarianism, and ignorance involved in the area of nutrition.

Cheerios are perfectly healthy for almost everyone. You don't need to buy an expensive buckwheat quinoa kale macadamia nut SuperFood(tm)

A lot of the anti-carb stuff is from people who think eating meat all the time is best and don't want to hear different. Even if you (falsely) believed your ancestors were mainly hunters, that doesn't mean they were eating only supermarket steaks made of muscle tissue. They would've been eating all the tissues. Organ meats. Bon apetite.

Cereals can be healthy, but Cheerios are a refined form which is obviously sub-optimal. If you want a carbohydrate rich breakfast, a fiber-rich alternative like steel cut oats provides superior benefits.

Agreed. But if I were to rank Cheerios, they would rank quite high. No added sugar or sweeteners. Important vitamin fortifications. No fillers or other bad stuff. And oats aren't bad in terms of glycemic load and aren't a common allergen. I would give Cheerios either a B+ or A- whereas steel cut oats are like an A

My breakfast consists a cup of coffee (no sugar) since my teens. I'm just not hungry in the morning.

I eat a good breakfast only if I need to do an intense effort, or if I cannot control when I'm going to eat for lunch (business trips can have difficult schedules..).

Dr McDougall suggests 80% of calories should be from complex carbohydrates, and it’s a diet that has worked well for many— especially for diabetics and people with heart / blood pressure problems. I think it’s really hard to know exactly what is good vs bad for any given individual.

The really basic thermodynamic approach of just measuring calories has fallen out of fashion for some reason, but given that both protein and fat just reduce down to carbs and simple sugars after a certain point, it seems to me that the relative differences between them are overrated. Macronutrient ratios probably just don't matter that much as long as you are meeting your essential amino and fatty acid levels, which is extremely easy to do in a developed country.

There are some important and complex considerations with respect to certain things like gut flora, for instance. Or people with particular genes that change how their metabolism works, or their liver enzymes. But nutrition science is primitive and self-contradictory at the moment. We lack the knowledge to provide a personalized medicine approach.

> 315 calories where 80% of calories are from carbs isn’t good.

Most of what you need in your diet is "empty calories". One must carry on, thermodynamically speaking. Last night at dinner I had ~500 calories of rice, which was barely enough to compensate for an hour of moderate bicycling. If a person's lifestyle is so sedentary that they can't even sink 300 calories of carbs, the problem in that scenario is the inactivity, not the carbs.

> and they’re better than a lot of other common breakfast options (pastries)

Better how?

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