Choosing a healthy breakfast cereal

How healthy is your breakfast cereal?
Choosing a healthy breakfast cereal is not a simple task. The cereal aisle is a long one, full of contradictions. You'll find cereals made with refined grains with nearly no fiber, and cereals made with whole grains and bran boasting 7 grams or more of fiber. There are cereals with so much sugar they seem more like boxes of little cookies. And there are cereals with sugar listed far down on the ingredient list.

But it's well worth the effort, experts say. If you eat cereal almost every day, either for breakfast or as a snack, the cereal you choose can say a lot about your health. It can add a lot of good stuff to your diet -- or it can add a whole lot of nothing.

Choosing a healthy breakfast cereal is mainly about getting some whole grains. There's no excuse not to get at least one serving of whole grains if you eat cereal for breakfast. Recent research suggests those who eat more whole grains are at lower risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Taste or Nutrition?
The trick is finding a breakfast cereal that is full of healthful attributes, low in sugar, and has no saturated fat and trans fat -- but still tastes great! It doesn’t matter how good for you a cereal is; if it doesn’t taste good, you’re probably not going to eat it day after day.

Of course, one person’s perfect whole-grain cereal with less sugar is another person’s bowl of sawdust. If you like breakfast cereals that come in lots of colors and artificial flavors, then yes, you probably do have to choose between taste and nutrition. But if you like a cereal with natural flavors from toasted whole grains, and maybe some nuts and dried fruit, you'll have many healthful cereals to choose from.

And yes, dried fruits do add nutrition to your cereal. A quarter of a cup of raisins, for example, has about 1 1/2 grams of fiber plus 4% of the Recommended Daily Value for vitamin E and about 6% each of the Daily Value for vitamins B-1, B-6, and iron, magnesium, and selenium. But when you look on the nutrition facts label for Raisin Bran, for example, you might be shocked to see there are 19 grams of sugar in a 1-cup serving. What’s going on is that any sugars -- even those from natural sources like dried fruit -- are counted in the sugar grams listed on the label. It may be helpful for the consumer to review the ingredient listing of a Nutrition Fact label to identify added sugars rather than reading the amount of total sugars in the product.

How Much Sugar?
Does the ingredients list for your cereal look a lot like that on, say, a box of cookies? One ounce of Mini Oreo cookies has 11 grams of sugar and 130 calories (34% of its calories come from sugar). And sugar is the second ingredient listed (enriched flour is first). Lots of cereals have ingredient lists that look similar -- like Cookie Crisp Cereal, with 44% calories from sugar.

The U.S. Government's Dietary Reference Intakes recommend that added sugars not exceed 25% of total calories (to ensure sufficient intake of micronutrients). And while there isn’t a specific guideline for cereal, it makes sense to aim for a cereal that gets 25% or less of its calories from sugar. (If the cereal contains dried fruit, this could be a pinch higher.)

While you can find plenty of cereals with 5 grams of fiber per serving or more, some of them go a little bit over the "25% calories from sugar" guideline. But if the percentage of sugar calories is still below 30%, the first ingredient is a whole grain, and the cereal tastes good, it may still be a good choice overall.

8 Good-Tasting Picks
After some taste testing and input from acquaintances, I came up with eight picks for the best-tasting healthful breakfast cereals. The cereals on my list had to have a whole grain as the first ingredient and 5 grams of fiber per serving. Sugar had to be around 25% calories from sugar or less, unless dried fruit was among the top three ingredients. I also tried to choose cereals that are easily found in the supermarket.

Post Grape-Nuts Trail Mix Crunch: 5 grams fiber, and 22% calories from sugar. The first three ingredients are whole grain wheat, malted barley, and sugar, followed by raisins and wheat bran.
Fiber One Bran Cereal: 14 grams fiber, 0% calories from sugar. First three ingredients are whole-grain wheat bran, corn bran, and cornstarch. This cereal only appeals to some people. I would suggest enhancing the flavor with cinnamon, fresh or dried fruit, and/or roasted nuts.
*Fiber One Honey Clusters: 13 grams fiber, 15% calories from sugar. The first three ingredients are whole-grain wheat, corn bran, and wheat bran.
Quaker Oatmeal Squares: 5 grams fiber, 19% calories from sugar. The first three ingredients are whole oat flour, whole-wheat flour, and brown sugar.
Shredded wheat: 6 grams fiber, 0% calories from sugar (for a generic brand). The only ingredient is 100% whole grain cereal. I enjoy this with added fresh or dried fruit and nuts. If you opt for the frosted variety, it has 6 grams fiber and gets 23% of its calories from sugar.
*Frosted Mini Wheats: 6 grams fiber, 24% calories from sugar. The first three ingredients are whole-grain wheat, sugar, and high-fructose corn syrup.
*Raisin Bran: 7 grams fiber, 40% calories from sugar (in Kellogg’s brand). The first three ingredients are whole wheat, raisins, and wheat bran). Sugar is listed fourth in the ingredient list, but many of the calories from sugar come from the raisins.
Kashi Heart to Heart Honey Toasted Oat Cereal: 5 grams fiber, 18% calories from sugar. The first three ingredients are whole oat flour, oat bran, and evaporated cane juice. This is a higher-fiber alternative to Cheerios. I think they taste better, too. But that may be because there is more sweetener added (the evaporated cane juice).

Read the full article here.

* indicates a personal choice (even I wouldn't eat some of these "healthy" options!)

What's the Buzz: Protein

Protein is an essential nutrient that is important to good health. It is used by our bodies to produce and grow muscles, hair, nails, skin and internal organs. Proteins used for synthesis within the body are comprised of amino acids, many of which the body cannot produce on its own. We therefore must ingest protein to supplement the body's amino acid production to enable us to grow, heal, and function normally.

The great thing about protein is that it's not only delicious and nutritious, but easy to get in a variety of forms! Everyone knows that meat contains protein, but so do dairy products, nuts, legumes, and other sources.

Foods that are high in protein:
Meat, fish (including canned tuna)
Eggs or egg substitute
Milk
Yogurt
Cheese (including cottage cheese)
Beans
Soy
Nuts (including peanut butter)
Seeds
Lentils (including peas and chickpeas)
Tofu
Wheat germ or wheat gluten, as contained in--
*Some whole-wheat pastas (check label, look for at least 10g protein per 1 cup serving)
*Some cereals (check label, look for at least 5g protein per serving)

Surprisingly, even though the list above is rather specific, most people consume adequete amounts of protein in their regular diet. The body just doesn't need much to meet it's requirements. In fact, most Americans consume more than enough protein daily. Only a few specific groups of people are at risk for being protein-deficient, including elderly women and people with illnesses or eating disorders. Protein should make up approximately 10-15% of your total daily caloric intake, according to the recommended daily allowances (RDA) set by the Food and Nutrition Board, with the other 85% coming from fat and carbs (15% and 70% respectively). Ideally, one should consume 0.36 grams of protein for every pound of body weight, meaning someone who weighs 120lbs should consume about 43 grams of protein per day and someone weighing 180 lbs needs roughly 64 grams of protein per day unless otherwise advised by a physician. Consuming more than 30% of your daily calories from protein can have adverse effects on the body, as the relative reduction of carbohydrates can cause it to enter a canabalistic state known as "ketosis." Excess protein consumption is especially a concern due to the fact that most sources of animal-protein (meat and dairy) are high in unhealthy saturated fat.

Someone who is having trouble meeting the recommended daily allowance for protein through their regular diet might consider drinking protein shakes, such as the following recipe:

Banana/Peanut Butter Shake (12 grams protein)
8 ounces fat-free milk
1 tablespoon creamy peanut butter
1/4 - 1/2 banana

Blend until smooth in blender.

Protein powders can also be used as an additive to any smoothie/shake-type recipe to boost protein content. A simple alternative is to purchase ready-made meal replacement drinks, such as Ensure, Boost, or SlimFast (check label, look for at least 9-10 grams of protein per 8oz serving). However, remember that these are meant to be meal "replacement" drinks--they are quite high in calories and are NOT intended to supplement your regular meals!

Technically this isn't about food...

But I like coffee, and I like exercise, and so I was intrigued by the following article:

Exercise Plus Coffee May Ward Off Skin Cancer
A coffee habit, coupled with regular exercise, may help prevent skin cancers better than either factor alone, new research suggests.

The study was done only with animals, however, and it's not a reason to abandon standard sun-protection habits. "You should not give up the sunblock," said Dr. Allan H. Conney, senior author of the study, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings aren't entirely new. "In earlier studies, we found caffeine and exercise -- either one by themselves -- inhibited ultraviolet light-induced skin cancer in mice," said Conney, the director of the Laboratory for Cancer Research at the School of Pharmacy at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. But the new research shows that "the combination [of the two] works better," he said, providing a dramatically better anti-cancer result. Both caffeine and exercise seem to help kill the UVB-damaged cells before malignancy sets in. "We really don't know how that happens," Conney said.

In the study, his team looked at four groups of hairless mice. The rodents' exposed skin is very vulnerable to the sun. One group was given caffeinated water to drink each day, the equivalent of a person drinking a couple of cups of coffee a day, Conney said. Another group ran voluntarily on a running wheel, the equivalent of a person running two or two and a half miles every day, he said. (These mice will happily go on an exercise wheel if one is available, Conney said.) A third group had both the caffeine and the exercise, while a fourth group had neither and served as the control group. The mice in all four groups were exposed to lamps that generated UVB radiation that damaged the skin cells' DNA.

While some degree of healthy, programmed skin cell death ("apoptosis") was seen in all four groups of mice, the caffeine drinkers and exercisers were best at killing off the damaged cells, the researchers found.

To find out how different the four groups were in terms of killing off damaged skin cells, the researchers looked at physical changes in those cells. They also looked at chemical markers, such as enzymes, involved in killing damaged cells. The differences were dramatic. The caffeine drinkers showed a 96 percent increase in damaged cell death compared to the control group and the exercisers showed a 120 percent increase. Even more significant, the mice that drank caffeine and ran on the training wheel had a nearly 400 percent increase in cell death of damaged cells.

A spokesman for the Skin Cancer Foundation urged caution in interpreting the study findings, however. "It will take years of extensive testing to determine whether this will be a worthwhile concept before you can say anything specific about it," said Dr. Michael Gold, founder of the Gold Skin Care Center in Nashville, Tenn.

"Mice and humans are very different. That said, we do know that caffeine applied topically has been popular as a 'cosmeceutical' anti-aging ingredient and might be useful in helping prevent non-melanoma skin cancers," Gold said. "The concept of systemic caffeine needs to be addressed further. We also know that moderate exercise is an immune moderator and can help ward off cancers and other diseases."

He echoed standard advice to wear sunscreen when out in the sun. "If you are exercising outside you must wear sunscreen no matter what," Gold said. "If you don't protect yourself from the sun while exercising outdoors you are increasing your risk of getting non-melanoma skin cancers and melanoma. Protecting yourself from the sun is currently the only proven way to prevent skin cancer."

Read the full article here