Breakfast is a Dangerous Meal: Why You Should Ditch Your Morning Meal For Health and Wellbeing. Terence Kealey

       Myth No. 1: Breakfast cereals are healthy

      Oh no they’re not. They’re largely carbohydrates befouled by sugar, and it is hard to think of a worse morning meal. In 2006 the British consumer protection magazine Which? examined 275 different breakfast cereals, finding that ‘Nearly 90 per cent of the cereals in our sample that targeted children were high in sugar, 13 per cent were high in salt and 10 per cent were high in saturated fat.’ The report was entitled Cereal Re-offenders, referring to the reluctance of the manufacturers to respond to repeated criticisms.¹

      And though the manufacturers may add nutrients to their products, they will first have removed them: here is Felicity Lawrence’s account in her 2008 book Eat Your Heart Out of the denuding of cornflake nourishment:

      Cornflakes are generally made by breaking corn kernels into smaller grits which are then steam cooked in batches of up to a tonne under pressure of about 20lbs per square inch. The nutritious germ with its essential fats is first removed because, as the Kellogg brothers discovered all that time ago, it goes rancid over time and gets in the way of long shelf life. Flavourings, vitamins to replace those lost in processing and sugar may be added at this stage.²

      Consider niacin (vitamin B3). A deficiency of niacin causes a disease called pellagra, which is an unpleasant condition known for the four Ds: diarrhoea, dermatitis, dementia and death. Pellagra was once epidemic in the American south, and between 1905 and 1940 some 3 million people developed it, of whom about 100,000 died.³ Because niacin is found in meat, fish, eggs, fruit, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, fungi, beer and yeast extracts such as Marmite, pellagra is a disease of a very deficient diet, and the epidemic of the American south developed only because many of the inhabitants were so poor that they subsisted on a diet primarily of maize (corn) that had been ‘de-germed’ during its preparation. The de-germination removed the niacin from the cornmeal.^fn1

      Partly because the folk memory of the pellagra epidemic has not been lost, and partly because niacin is cheap, the manufacturers of breakfast cereal now boast of how much of it they add, voluntarily, to their products. But, actually, too much is added, and if children today consumed no niacin-fortified foods, only 2.9 per cent of them would consume less than the EAR (Estimated Average Requirement). But currently 28 per cent of American children aged 2 to 8 years old ingest more than the recommended UL (upper limit) – and 2.9 per cent of children consuming less than the EAR may represent less of a public health risk than 28 per cent of them consuming more than the UL.⁴

      Other cereal supplements, too, have caused concern. Some manufacturers fortify their products with iron, and in consequence some children consume toxic amounts of it. And in consequence of that, certain countries such as Norway now ban the fortification of breakfast cereals with iron. The authors of a recent study concluded that: ‘Obtaining recommended daily allowances (RDAs) and adequate intakes (AIs) from nonfortified food continues to have the advantage of (i) providing intakes of other potential nutrients and food components, and (ii) potentially enhancing intakes through simultaneous interactions with other nutrients.’⁵ Which in English says: ‘Eat natural, not artificial, food. Avoid breakfast cereals.’

      If breakfast cereals were replaced by unprocessed, more natural foods, children would be healthier: after all, the consumption of ready-to-eat cereals is predominantly an English-speaking phenomenon, and there is no systematic evidence that non-Anglophonic children suffer for not consuming them.

      The unhealthiness of breakfast cereals has long inspired humour, and in his 1975 novel Changing Places David Lodge wrote that the campus newspaper: ‘had recently reported an experiment in which rats fed on cornflake packets had proved healthier than rats fed on the cornflakes’.⁶

      And this humour is translating into consumer resistance: Euromonitor International, the marketing company, report that since 2012 breakfast cereal sales in countries such as the USA and UK have fallen by at least 1 per cent a year; and the decline is predicted to continue as consumers increasingly switch to yoghurt, fresh fruits and other protein-based, more natural, low-carbohydrate, low-sugar products.⁷

      The US Department of Agriculture continues to defend breakfast cereals as becoming ever healthier,⁸ but consumers are, rightly, resisting the corporate message.