Unlucky Charms

Despite having written seven books in the Wheat Belly series and people talking about the benefits of going “gluten-free,” there continues to be a lot of confusion or unclear thinking about these issues. So I’ve decided to resurrect some of the conversations I’ve posted in past when Wheat Belly was a hot topic of conversation. Let’s start with a conversation about breakfast cereals. Shown above is the breakfast cereal aisle at a Walmart store. People actually buy this crap.

Is there such a thing as a HEALTHY breakfast cereal?

Simple answer: No.

Let’s consider the most common ingredients in breakfast cereals: wheat flour, corn, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar. In effect, they therefore contain sugar, sugar, sugar, and sugar. That ain’t good. It explains why the glycemic index of breakfast cereals are exceptionally high, usually 70 and above. (Sucrose is 59-65, depending on the study you look at.) Breakfast cereals for kids, such as Apple Jacks and Corn Pops, can be as high as 25-37% sugar by weight, with the other ingredients the same or worse than sugar.

How about those coarser cereals with whole grains like oats, millet, buckwheat, etc., such as muesli? Same issues. Followers of the Wheat Belly conversation understand that whole grains are wrongly called “low” glycemic index; they should really be called “less-high” glycemic index. If, for instance, a bowl of sugary cornflakes raises blood sugar from 90 mg/dl to 190 mg/dl, but a bowl of muesli raises blood sugar to 170 mg/dl—it’s not low, just less high. This is true even if there is no added sugar.

The wheat component of cereals, of course, carries all the excess baggage unique to wheat, including appetite stimulation by the gliadin protein via binding to the brain’s opiate receptors, provocation of small LDL particle formation that leads to coronary heart disease, small bowel damage from wheat germ agglutinin, abnormal bowel permeability from gliadin, and unique allergens such as alpha amylase inhibitors and omega-gliadins. The people at General Mills’ concession to this issue is reflected in the “gluten-free” claim on some of the many versions of the Lucky Charms box, as if this fixed all the problems associated with grains and sugar.

Breakfast cereals are big business. They have come to dominate breakfast (and snacking) habits. Why else would they fill an entire supermarket aisle, floor to ceiling, and generate some $11 billion in annual sales?

Breakfast cereals by definition, in all their various shapes, varieties, flavors, colors, and marketing angles, are all grains with added sugar. As we have previously discussed, grains all represent various degrees of compromise in health. That’s why I call grains the food of the desperate or the ignorant. That, of course, does not stop the American Heart Association from having endorsed products including Berry Kix, Count Chocula, and Cheerios with their awful Check Mark stamp of approval (that manufacturers pay for).

It should come as no surprise that there is no such thing as a healthy breakfast cereal. After all, the whole notion of breakfast cereal originated with William and John Kellogg who, in the late 19th century, operated a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, where you would stay for a month or two and receive four enemas per day, along with three meals of gruel to “cure” your lumbago, rheumatism, or cancer. One day, while preparing gruel, William was called away, only to return hours later to find his gruel on the table, dry. Being frugal, he wondered if there was a way to salvage it; putting it through a roller, a lightbulb of inspiration went off: thus was flaked cereal invented. So the notion of breakfast cereal started with two men who believed that four enemas a day cured cancer.

For anyone missing the crunchiness of a breakfast “cereal” without the health issues, see the Coconut Almond “Granola” recipe here in this blog (Inner Circle kitchen) or the Grainless Granola recipe in the Wheat Belly Cookbook. No grains here!

The original IHB post is currently found on the: ⎆Infinite Health Blog, but accessing it there can require an unnecessary separate blog membership. The copy of it above is complete, and has been re-curated and enhanced for the Inner Circle membership.