Don’t Eat This Sh*t — #1
Welcome to my new column: Don’t Eat This Sh*t. I guess you’ve already guessed from the title what it’s about. There are tons of sh*tty foods out there with labels trying to lure you in, telling you why you should eat them, harping on how they’re going to make you healthier, slim your waistline or somehow lead you to what you’ve been lacking. While some might be partially true, some are outright BS, at best misleading, at worst harmful to your health. This column is all about shining the harsh halogen lamp on some of the more heinous examples of foods that don’t actually have much food in them at all.
As a child of the 80s and 90s, an era when dietary recommendations were too often ill-advised, politically motivated and driven by Big Money interests, I’ve spent the last 10 years trying to undo the damage of a lifetime eating sh*tty foods with misleading labels like “Fat Free”, “Heart Healthy” and “Low Sugar”, most of which I believed until I got type 2 diabetes and started paying more attention.
One of the headliners topping the list of sh*t you’re better off laying off of are breakfast cereals.
This one is particularly sinister because its marketing and branding go after our kids, getting them hooked at an early age, indoctrinating them with the belief that life is less fun and fulfilling without them.
The allure of breakfast cereals actually started way back in the 1890s when James Caleb Jackson and John Harvey Kellogg of corn flake fame unleashed one of the most brilliant and now famous advertising slogans of all time — breakfast, the most important meal of the day. Yes, the line that would become ingrained in our psyches for all of eternity, the one your grandmothers, teachers and doctors have repeated throughout your life, started as nothing more than a clever catchphrase carefully constructed to make breakfast cereal seem like a necessity.
Now, I’m not saying breakfast isn’t important. For some it is, albeit for some not as much. What is important is WHAT you eat for breakfast. And the worst sh*t you can possibly shovel down to start your day is the sugary, chemically concocted, nutrient devoid, sickeningly sweet cereal swimming in milk, usually heated to high temperatures that all but strip it of whatever might have made it sort of healthy before it made its way into your bowl.
Here are 5 good reasons why breakfast cereals top the list of sh*t you shouldn’t eat:
1. The grains used to make them are highly processed and refined, meaning the once healthy plant-based food is chemically disfigured into something far from food at all, usually stripped of its hull, the part that contains fibre and nutrients, the stuff that makes grains healthy.
2. They’re loaded with added sugars. In fact, among processed foods, breakfast cereals are amongst the highest in added sugar. Pick any one of them up off the shelf and see for yourself. Sugar is almost always one of the first ingredients listed on the back label. Combine that with the fact that they’ve been stripped of their fibre and breakfast cereals are one of the most high-glycemic foods on the planet. That means they get turned into glucose long before your body has time to use them as energy causing sharp spikes in blood sugar. This leads to insulin overproduction and then insulin resistance, the precursor to type 2 diabetes. Plus, because they are metabolised so quickly, a few hours later you get massively hungry again, usually craving more empty carbs.
3. They’re often made with hydrogenated oils, aka trans fats, another food on the list of no nos. But I’ll save these for another article as they deserve the title sh*t you shouldn’t eat just as much as breakfast cereals.
4. We usually eat cereal with milk, which in itself might not be so bad, except for the fact that most of the milk we have access to these days has gone through pasteurisation, a chemical process that destroys all the milk’s beneficial bacteria and enzymes and all but strips it of any nutrients it once offered. The milk debate is one that’s too huge to tackle here but my position is: Don’t drink that sh*t, for the reasons mentioned above.
5. Misleading labels are commonplace among breakfast cereals. Most of the brands you know are owned by huge corporations that lobby and pay extraordinary amounts of money for the right to slap untrue health claims on their packaging. Even the so called healthier options allowed to say ‘made from whole grains’ or ‘low in sugar’ are heavily processed and still contain added sugars often disguised by different names designed to mislead you into thinking they are healthy.
Here is a link to all the misleading words companies use in place of sugar:
The bottom line is simple: if you really want be healthy, don’t eat anything that comes in a box, especially breakfast cereals.
There are plenty of other options and let’s be honest, life without breakfast cereals is more than liveable.
You’re far better off whipping up some steel cut oats with a little honey and fresh fruit, cooking up some eggs in a pan with grass fed butter, mixing a smoothie with your favourite berries, a veggie or two and some greek yogurt, almond or oat milk, or really rustling up any other real, whole food you can actually hold in your hand say “hey I recognise you.”
Breakfast cereals aren’t the only reason we live in a world plagued by type 2 diabetes, chronic inflammation, child obesity and worse, but they are definitely a major contributor.
So if you’re like me, and you want to at least give yourself a fighting chance to grow old healthily, there’s really only one approach to breakfast cereals that makes any sense: Don’t eat that sh*t.
More about me
I’m Scott Cohen — I run a coaching business called Kitchen Therapy where I help my clients learn to live with type 2 diabetes, obesity and metabolic disorders by learning how to live without them. https://www.kitchen-therapy-coaching.com/about-me
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