The Breakfast Cereal Addiction
How the American Heart Association helped make America unhealthy
How did cereal become such a large part of the American diet? How did Amercans go from eating eggs for breakfast or maybe oats, to eating ultra-processed or processed breakfast cereals? Why did we give up one of the most nutritionally dense foods known to humankind for a “fortified” sugary fest of carbs, with a dollop of seed oils, artificial flavors, and dyes added in?
To provide some context, please follow me down a personal retrospective rabbit hole, dialing the clock way back to 2019. And get ready to blow up your TV.
In 2019, Jill took a bad fall off of her stallion while jumping, and sustained a trimalleolar fracture, resulting in a plate and 10 pins in her ankle. It was unclear if she would ever walk normally again. Earlier that year, she had slipped while hiking in the Azores during a wedding anniversary vacation and had broken her other ankle. Then, at the end of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic craziness, she got hit by a horse hoof when a young colt reared up. That hoof nailed her squarely in the face - resulting in teeth getting knocked out, others having to be pulled, then a year-old process of bone grafts, facial reconstruction and finally tooth implants in early 2022. Yeah, all during that crazy year of 2021, when I was thrown into the spotlight while suffering from long COVID and post-vaccination injury, Jill was battling issues of both neuropathic damage to her foot and ankle (which will be lifelong) and a disfiguring injury to her face.
Bottom line, lots of stress, lots of travel, not much exercise and we both gained a lot of weight. So, about mid-2022, we committed to losing that weight and radically changing our diets. Over the past two years, we each have lost over fifty pounds.
Jill's “first” career was working with exotic animals as a behaviorist and zoo keeper, and she was an animal science major at UC Davis before switching to behavioral anthropology at UC San Diego as her undergraduate degree. She was very focused on factory farms and farming practices. By way of additional background, we both have had high cholesterol since our thirties. For those reasons, we switched to a vegetarian diet around 1992. So, at the time we committed to weight loss, we had been vegetarians for thirty years.
When the vaccine injury to my heart eventually brought me to the doorstep of Dr. Brooke Miller, he ran some blood tests and then insisted that I change my diet to include meat; he advocated a carnivore diet as a way to drop pounds. Jill and I spent a month researching high-protein diets, and concluded that this radically different way of eating made sense for us.
We basically put ourselves on a “paleo” diet.
As an aside, we still eat some grains (bread and pasta - but in significantly reduced amounts), a bit of cheese, and milk in our coffee.
We began by reducing the amounts of bread, starches, and cereals. We stopped using all seed oils. We stopped eating ultra-processed foods
We took up intermittent fasting. We reduced our calorie intake to 60-70% of what it once was.
To this day, we eat “clean.” We are not perfect, but our diet has been radically changed, and the results have been phenomenal.
One of the most critical steps in our road to a different way of eating was the elimination of breakfast cereals from our diet. I am not writing of fruit loops or other “sugary” cereals - which we have always avoided. But for us, the basic staples included such cereals as Cheerios, oat bran, raisin bran, granola, etc.
Yep - the cereal boxes were removed from our kitchen. The cereal in them was fed to the chickens (waste not, want not). Traveling down a road pioneered by many others, we realized that breakfast cereals are evil. Not just for us, but for all American adults.
If this wasn’t bad enough, Americans began spoon-feeding this junk to toddlers - as soon as a spoon could fit in their tiny mouths. Cereal is now eaten as breakfast, an afternoon snack, for dinner, and as an after-dinner snack. Cereal is promoted as a healthy food - yet…
On average, children’s cereals are made up of 34 percent sugar by weight, and most children in the USA eat about ten pounds of sugar each year from cereal alone.
Furthermore, some children eat a lot of cereal, much more than the relatively small portion size of one serving.
Here is the amount of sugar in the worse offenders; some of these brands come in at over 50% by weight - pure sugar!
Much of that sugar is in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, which is highly addictive. You may ask why high-fructose corn syrup is used. High fructose corn syrup is considered an ultra-processed food. The manufacturing process uses enzymes and acids to convert some of the glucose from corn syrup into fructose, which is significantly sweeter. This makes it even more addictive, particularly for little kids.
Market sales of cereal in the USA for 2024 topped over 13 billion USD. Breakfast cereals are made up primarily of the basic forms of carbohydrates: starches and sugars.
There are many ideas about why obesity and being overweight are so prevalent in the USA. Here is one interesting model-
According to this model, the quality of food consumed, particularly the intake of processed carbohydrates, plays a critical role in body weight management rather than just total calorie intake. This theory posits that the key to avoiding obesity is to forego processed carbohydrates and focus on whole foods, which are more effective for weight loss and maintenance, which is precisely what Jill and I now do.
It is as much the quality of food intake, not just quantity, that affects obesity.
That said, sugary cereals are addictive. Many people eat multiple bowls of cereal daily. Many children eat multiple bowls of cereal a day. Let’s face it, cereal is easy, cheap to buy, safe to prepare, and readily available. But it isn’t just the cereal that people eat, but then they top the cereal bowl with sugar. Plus, the added milk sugars… That means lots of excess calories.
Cereal contributes to obesity, as it is a low quality, high carb food AND, because it is addictive, which adds excess calories to one’s daily diet.
Blow up your TV (eggs), eat a lot of …
Eggs contain high-quality protein and a wide-range of vitamins and minerals [13]. They are one of the most widely available economical sources of animal protein. As an added benefit, many of the nutrients in eggs can be increased by altering the hen’s diet (for example, Selenium, vitamin E, vitamin D, omega-3 fatty acids, xanthophylls and folate). This means that a much higher quality egg is readily produced by the backyard chicken owner and homesteader than what is commercially available.
When did Americans stop eating eggs? The significant change came in 1968 when the American Heart Association recommended limiting egg consumption to three per week due to cholesterol concerns. “Coincidently,” the first drug (Questran) to reduce cholesterol levels was approved by the FDA shortly thereafter.
In 1977, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs used these heart association recommendations to advocate for dietary goals for a healthier diet that included a reduction of the meat and eggs thought to raise cholesterol. A 1984 Time magazine cover story about cholesterol further damaged the egg's reputation.
Mainstream media and big pharma piled on, as the cholesterol-lowering drugs came onto the scene.
The first statin drug, lovastatin, was licensed for commercial use in the United States on September 1, 1987, and then over the next few years, several other statin drugs hit the market. Lipitor, known generically as atorvastatin, was first licensed for medical use in the United States in 1996 and quickly became one of the most widely prescribed medications ever, generating around $12 billion in annual sales at its peak. The patent for Lipitor ran out in 2011. From 2011 to the present, most of the other cholesterol-lowering drugs also became available as generics, which removed the huge profits from big pharma for their statin sales.
All that money spent, with the end result being:
Lack of an association or an inverse association between low-density-lipoprotein cholesterol and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review.
Cardiovascular medicine. Vol 6.
DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2015-010401
Conclusions: High LDL-C is inversely associated with mortality in most people over 60 years. This finding is inconsistent with the cholesterol hypothesis (ie, that cholesterol, particularly LDL-C, is inherently atherogenic). Since elderly people with high LDL-C live as long or longer than those with low LDL-C, our analysis provides reason to question the validity of the cholesterol hypothesis. Moreover, our study provides the rationale for a re-evaluation of guidelines recommending pharmacological reduction of LDL-C in the elderly as a component of cardiovascular disease prevention strategies.
As the profits went out of the statin market, slowly, the media hype that eggs were unhealthy died out. Coincidence?
What has emerged over the last decade is that the relationship between cholesterol and mortality is complicated. High cholesterol levels and mortality in the elderly are inversely proportional. The truth is that higher cholesterol is protective in the elderly cohort.
That confounding variables, such as obesity, a sedentary lifestyle, other poor dietary choices, such as salt, ultra-processed foods, and seed oils, and/or inflammation, contaminate the large data sets used to assess the risk of high cholesterol and CVD.
With an understanding of confounding variables, consider this paper:
Food Sources of Animal Protein in Relation to Overall and Cause-Specific Mortality-Causal Associations or Confounding? An Analysis of the EPIC-Heidelberg Cohort
Nutrients 2023 Jul 26;15(15):3322. doi: 10.3390/nu15153322.
The conclusions of this large and very recent study is that when confounding variables, such as smoking, high obesity levels, heavy alcohol consumption, and low physical activity were eliminated, the authors found NO EVIDENCE that a diet rich in red meat affected cardiovascular and cancer-related mortality. Furthermore, there was no evidence that eating poultry, milk, cheese or red meat affected mortality rates either.
In summary, we found no convincing evidence that any of the principal food sources of animal protein are meaningful determinants for overall cardiovascular or cancer-related mortality risk, independently of smoking, alcohol consumption, and excess body weight.
The truth is that the most significant reason for the decrease in CVD rates and mortality is that Americans smoke less. Smoking is responsible for a substantial proportion of CVD-related deaths. The CDC estimated in 2010 that smoking caused approximately 33% of all deaths from CVD and about 20% of deaths from ischemic heart disease in individuals over 35 years old.
One doesn’t need a graph to see this trendline.
The decrease in CVD rates in the USA most likely has little to do with the very slight decrease in cholesterol levels.
What trendline?
The interesting thing about the above chart is that the data on cholesterol levels is unavailable for the years after 2002. All that money spent on statins throughout the USA, and no government organization collected the data? Huh?
Americans have spent billions on statins - synthetic cholesterol-lowering drugs- to what benefit?
Americans have greatly modified their diet for years upon years. A promoted diet that increased obesity and inflammation, and for what? From Healthline:
This all gets rather tiresome and confusing.
Was it the chicken of the egg?
Then, what a surprise! Once the profits went out of the statin market, what did the American Heart Association advocate (remember them)? They were the ones who started the whole massive media campaign to stop Americans from eating eggs in 1968.
In 2019, the American Heart Association began recommending eggs as a health food.
Out with the old, in with the new!
With the new dietary guidelines of 2024, the FDA, for the first time, began recommending eggs as a healthy food.
One can not ignore the amount of damage done by this fifty-year lobbying and marketing campaign against eggs. The advertising campaign that drove the shift from healthy egg-centered breakfasts to processes cereals? The rates of metabolic disease, obesity, and fatty liver disease in children and adults have skyrocketed. The rise of high-carb, low-nutrient breakfast cereals as replacements for eggs has contributed to the decline in health.
Nothing to see here, move on folks.
The American people deserve better than this.
The government and big media have a habit of backing lousy science when it comes to dietary guidelines. This decades-long war against eggs outlined above is a prime example of this.
The truth is that the government’s push to ban eggs from the American breakfast coincided with a push to fill every American cabinet with “enriched” or “fortified” cereals- little more than junk food - (particularly for children) and the simultaneous propaganda to prescribe as many statin drugs as possible.
One last piece to the puzzle comes from across the pond.
Belgium reportedly has the highest saturated fat intake in the world, which is 95 grams of fat per person per day. That includes every man, woman, and child. Ninety-five grams of fat is a little less than half of a cup or one stick of butter per day. According to the US government guidelines, people in Belgium should have a lower life expectancy. But in fact, the lifespan of most Belgians is 82.5 years, well above the European average and world averages. Belgium has a lower obesity rate than most of Europe.
Other countries with some of the highest saturated fat diets include;
Of interest is that none of the countries listed above have a lower life expectancy rate than Americans do.
Americans consume 24 to 26 grams of saturated fat per day, much lower than Belgium or any of the countries above. But that still isn’t good enough for the American Heart Association, which recommends no more than 5-6% of daily calories from saturated fats, equating to around 13-16 grams per day for most adults.
The need for uncorrupted nutritional advice is real. In the meantime…
Eat whole foods
Don’t eat ultra-processed foods
Eat plenty of protein
Don’t binge
Eat a wide variety of foods
Watch your alcohol consumption - as it is full of sugar
Consider calorie restriction as a way of life.
Consider intermittent fasting
Eat healthy fats, and avoid seed oils