I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating here, breakfast is the most important meal of the day, especially if you have a tendency to disordered eating (and given that you’re reading this post then perhaps that might be true of you).
For many women who struggle with disordered eating breakfast is either non-existent or inadequate.
One thing that I have noticed in my work is that women who feel sluggish in the morning often struggle to get through to lunchtime without snacking on high sugar foods.
Another thing that I have noticed about these women is that they very often eat sugary cereals for their breakfast, and sometimes these cereals are, for example, Coco Pops.
So what’s the connection?
To find out if there is a correlation between what these women eat and how they feel and behave let’s take a look at what Kelloggs tell us about their product:
‘Made with chocolate and added calcium, a 30g serving of Kellogg’s Coco Pops provides at least 25% of an adult’s recommended daily allowance (RDA) of vitamins thiamin, riboflavin, niacin, vitamin B6, folic acid, vitamin B12 and 17% of an adult’s RDA of iron and calcium.’
Sounds good doesn’t it? But let’s look at the list of ingredients (I don’t know about you but I was always told to avoid food with sugar in the top three on the ingredients list):
Rice, Sugar, Chocolate (4%)(Sugar, Cocoa Mass), Fat Reduced Cocoa Powder, Calcium Carbonate, Salt, Barley Malt Flavouring, Flavouring, Niacin, Iron, Vitamin B6, Riboflavin (B2), Thiamin (B1), Folic Acid, Vitamin B12.
To break this down we have white rice, a fast release carbohydrate, sugar, a super fast release carbohydrate, and then, erm, some more sugar, cocoa products and then vitamins.
Now let’s take a look at what they tell us about the GDA (Guideline Daily Amounts) of this product remembering that the information below is relevant to a 30g serving and that if we want to eat a low sugar food, one of the keys to successful weight loss, we need to look for foods with a maximum of 10g of sugar per 100g of product:
Calories: 116 (6%) per 30g serving
Sugar: 11g (12%) per 30g serving
Fat: 0.8g (1%) per 30g serving
Saturates 0.3g (2%) per 30g serving
Salt 0.2g (4%) per 30g serving
So the sugar content of this product per 100g is about 37g which makes a 100g serving about 40% of your GDA. Let’s be honest, who actually only eats 30g of Coco Pops (I don’t know about you but a 30g serving is tiny and would not sustain me in any way, shape, or form!)? It’s more likely that you’ll fill your bowl full. Why not test it out – pour out what you’d normally eat and then weigh it – how much sugar are you eating for breakfast?
Personal View: I’m not a fan of substituting good breakfasts and snacks with cereals. I avoid eating cereals myself as I find that they just don’t keep me going and feel starving and a bit ‘wobbly’ by 9 o’clock. Eating a nutritionally dense breakfast and a healthy snack mid-morning is much better for you and much more likely to help your body become the fat burning machine that you want it to become. Sounds strange but you have to eat your way out of a weight or eating problem!
So let’s look at the evidence. From examining the information published by Kelloggs we can see that Coco Pops are high in sugar and other fast release carbohydrates. This means that on the one hand they will not keep your hunger satisfied and on the other they release too much glucose into your blood stream which means that your blood sugar will rise rapidly and then plummet leaving you feeling tired and in need of more fast carbohydrates to keep you going. This might just lead to overeating or even binge eating.
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