Your “Healthy” Cereal is Lying to You

Allow me to dispel a common misconception about one of the most beloved breakfast foods in the modern world and then you can decide for yourself. Do not believe everything you are told about cereal, even “healthy” cereal.  

Cereal Lie #1: Cereal can be a “healthy” breakfast.  

Fact:  Cereal cannot be part of a healthy diet because cereal provides little to no nutritional value. The cereal company even tells you this…you must combine it with milk and fruit to be a “complete” breakfast.  However, this doesn’t add enough nutrients to make it a healthy breakfast. All packaged, dry cereals are produced by a process called “extrusion” which involves high heat and high pressure to form the grain into the O's, flakes, and other popular cereal shapes. Extrusion destroys most of the nutrients, including some of the chemical vitamins that are added to “fortify” the cereal. Extrusion especially ravages amino acids (the building blocks of protein) rendering them highly toxic. Protein structures are vastly altered, and as a result, new compounds form which are completely foreign, potentially harmful, and definitely not “part of a balanced breakfast”.  Yes, this includes “healthy” cereals from the “healthy” aisle just in case you started to question me there. (wink) We should also talk about sugar.  But we would need 10-15 more pages so I will make this short and "sweet".  Most cereals, even the healthy ones contain sugar.  Sugar is a problem for our body.  First, it is highly addictive.  Second, it causes your body to have a glycemic index spike through your cortisol.  This spike will then  come back down and that happens at about 2-3 pm as a drip in energy.  This my friends is your afternoon slump.  The culprit, your cereal.  What does your afternoon slump make you want to do, eat more sugar.  

Cereal Lie "#2: Cereal is loaded with tons of vitamins and minerals which means it provides nutrition and it is healthy.

Fact:   Many cereals have vitamins added, but these “vitamins”  are synthetic (man-made). The body is simply not designed to utilize synthetic vitamins. Many synthetic vitamins are actually treated as toxins and are eliminated by your body as quickly as possible – (If you take a synthetic multi-vitamin, you may notice that soon afterwards you pee green. This is your body dumping out the fake nutrients you just tried feeding it). Synthetic vitamins can also cause imbalances in the body that may lead to health problems in the long run. On top of this, the body cannot absorb many key nutrients if they are not consumed with foods that contain saturated fat. If you're eating boxed cereal with low-fat or skim milk, the vitamins and minerals added in are providing virtually no nutritional benefit whatsoever.

Cereal Lie #3:  But, I eat healthy Kashi cereal from the healthy aisle, that IS healthy!

Fact: High fiber, organic cereals made from “healthier” grains are marketed as the best nutritional choices. These cereals tend to have more protein than conventional dry packaged cereals. When the high-protein grains are extruded, they produce even more denatured protein. So your “healthy” cereal is potentially worse for your body than junk cereal since they contain more high-protein grains that have been ultra-processed.  It is just more work for your body to get rid of it because your body doesn’t want toxic denatured anything.

The Cereal Conundrum:  What can I eat that is fast if cereal is really bad??

After sleeping all night long, your body is craving nutrients and protein.  You would be surprised to find that frying up an egg, boiling a hard boiled egg and pairing it with some sprouted organic bread with grass fed butter is just as fast!  Or what about mixing up a homemade granola over the weekend and pairing that with plain greek yogurt and a drizzle of honey?  Your body will be so grateful for the nutrients and minerals you will be providing for it!

It has come to my attention that many people can claim many things on the internet and have NO proof to back up what they say. Everything written above was throughly researched. So, the sources I used was: Fallon, S. (2005). Dirty Secrets of the Food Processing Industry. Weston A Price.org. Retrieved August 10, 2011 from http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-foods/dirty-secrets-of-the-food-processing-industry.  And, my own experience and notes from schooling with the Nutritional Therapy Associations in the course Basics of Nutrition in the Foundations of Health.

- Amy Lakits, NTP, BS

9/10/25