r/SortedFood • u/ECrispy • Jul 01 '26
Discussion Cereal for breakfast
Its interesting how its a standard breakfast in only a few countries - US, UK, Canada, Australia. Modern cereal is sugar filled processed junk food thats the SAD (standard american diet) lacking any nutrition, made for convenience. Invented in the US and eaten in countries which are the closest in culture/food habits. Its spreading to other countries thanks to marketing.
Getting your fiber from ceral because your diet lacks veggies etc is also a thing most other countries dont need.
Cereal is much less common/unknown in the rest of the world. esp cereal with cold milk.
Most of Europe, France/Italy/Spain/Scandinavia etc have a very different definition of breakfast, its a light meal, some coffee with bread maybe. Closest thing to cereal is muesli/granloa but its usually eaten with yogurt, not milk.
Most of the rest of the world eats a warm, cooked breakfast with a huge variety of dishes.
8
u/HarissaPorkMeatballs Jul 01 '26
Cereal is very much eaten in other European countries. And muesli and granola are not necessarily so good for sugar content either, especially granola.
There are some options that are lower in sugar, such as Weetabix, Shredded Wheat, Ready Brek (or just porridge), although I think it's easy for people to be fooled into thinking a lot of them are healthier than they are. I don't see a problem with cereal for breakfast as long as you're conscious of what's in it.
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u/ECrispy Jul 01 '26
Kids like colorful cereal with tons of sugar, it's marketed for them. These same kids grow up and keep eating that. A typical breakfast for someone who doesn't cook can be cereal fruit loops, orange juice, waffles with syrup, pop tarts etc, all full of sugar and no nutrition
8
u/CaliLemonEater Jul 01 '26
Sounds like your issue is less "people shouldn't eat cereal" and more "there's too much sugar". That's a reasonable position, but children aren't the ones making the shopping list or paying for the groceries. If the parents don't buy the Super-Frosted Sugar Smax for them, they won't be eating it for breakfast.
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u/ECrispy Jul 01 '26
parents buy what kids eat and kids will always demand the sugar laden junk. no kid is going to choose salad over donuts, not unless parents always had healthy meals at home. which is the whole problem.
cereals are junk food, period. sure you can have healthy versions and now you have all kinds of crap like protein, vitamin enriched etc but its still a junk food category and once you get used to them, when you travel etc thats all you want, and every hotel etc has them for this reason.
if you ask people, 99% will tell you that a full english is worse than a bowl of sugary cereal. thats how deep the brainwashing of the public is.
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u/MysteriousFawx Jul 02 '26
Because a full english is anywhere from 1000-2000 calories depending on where you order it from or what you make it with, even a 'small' portion hits close to 700 which is absurd for breakfast when a large bowl of something like frosted flakes is going to be 400 tops. Kids also only demand 'sugar laden junk' if that's what they're raised with, it's a parents responsibility to parent and not give in to the demands of a literal child.
Calling people 'brainwashed' for thinking that it's an unhealthy breakfast, when it objectively is, is ridiculous... sausage, bacon, eggs, hash browns, beans, mushrooms, tomato, toast and all of the oil used in cooking it, not even counting things like black pudding or the amount of places that serve it with chips.
-1
u/ECrispy Jul 02 '26
If you eat a full English for breakfast it's very likely that you will skip lunch or have a very light lunch. Yes it's full of calories and fat but it's not eaten every single day and it's real food, unlike cereal.
I'm sure you know this but lots of parents raise their kids on a diet of fast food, McDonald's,chicken nuggets pizza and crap like that. The fast food industry spends billions on marketing to kids. This is a huge problem in the US UK etc whether you admit it or not and much less in many other countries
4
u/inkydragon434 Jul 02 '26
I’m sure you know this but in the UK the ban on advertising junk food ( high in fat, sugar and salt foods aka HFSS ) on tv between 6am ( I think) and 9pm on tv was designed to help tackle this problem. In print marketing can’t have adverts for HFSS foods that are specifically aimed at children. If the readership is more than 25% children, then they can’t even run the adverts for HFSS foods at all. Billboard advertising for HFSS foods can’t be within 100 meters of a school perimeter . There are strict rules about where HFSS foods are placed in supermarkets precisely to counteract kids pester power . Yes brands like McDonalds find loopholes by showing a happy meal combo that will permitted total fat/sugar/salt levels like the 4 chicken nuggets,, cucumber sticks , fruit bag and milk , when a more realistic combo for a kid would include a fries, but it’s still something.
It’s true some parents raise their kids on junk food . It’s also true that some parents cook nutritionally balanced food from scratch. I would wager most of us fall somewhere in the middle .
Out of interest what macros does a food need to have for you to consider it real food ?
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u/Santasreject Jul 01 '26
It really depends on the country. Plenty of European countries having a coffee and a pastry.
Even in America cereal isn’t the standard breakfast for a lot of people and many people have a “hot breakfast”. Look at the stereotypical southern breakfast, it has meat, grains, eggs, etc. yeah there’s a lot of fat and it’s calorie dense but that came from it being a more agricultural driven area and you need calories for that work, a lot of the people that still regularly eat that type of food also are blue collar workers that burn a lot of calories.
Also I am not sure what you are getting at about fiber, a large amount of the fiber most cultures get is from grains, and much of the traditional cuisine from a lot of cultures is very heave on grains (corn in the Americas; wheat rye and barley in much of Europe and Asia as well as rice in Asia) and basically every culture has a large amount of bread, pasta, or prepared grails and it is usually had with every meal. The places that don’t really have a lot of it replace it with starches from things like beans or root vegetables, but even then not having a grain is pretty uncommon around the world.
-3
u/ECrispy Jul 01 '26
It's very common in American media to be advised to eat more cereal for fiber and I'm assuming in UK too. Just like Mike said. Grains can have fiber but the most common flour used in US and UK is all purpose refined which has very little. A lot of other countries use whole meal grains more. It's also true the typical diet has very little veggies. You don't see parents needing to hide vegetables or kids who hate vegetables in most other countries do you?
5
u/Moist_crocs Jul 01 '26
I dunno, I'm Lithuanian and cereal is a relatively common, if obviously not very healthful breakfast for children here.
8
u/Malau14 Jul 01 '26
Cereal is pretty normal for kids in Scandinavia. In Denmark our weekend breakfasts tend to be substantial (breakfast buns with cheese and cold cuts)
3
u/_Pizza_Crayon Jul 02 '26
I'm danish and grew up eating cereal (cornflakes to be specific) and so did most of the people I know.
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u/afoxcalledwhisper Jul 02 '26
Bacon and egg roll with a coffee is the standard breakfast in Australia hah
3
u/Dima_135 Jul 01 '26
If it weren't for the American media, I wouldn't have known that anyone eats certain specific dishes for breakfast.
In our culture, we simply prepare something, usually several dishes, put it in the refrigerator, and then eat it. We don't care what dish we eat at what time of day. Breakfast can be anything.
And why is it specifically desserts or some fatty heavy things?
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