When I was a kid, I ate candy for breakfast. By which I mean cereal where sugar was the first five ingredients. Some of them even had sugar right in the name, like Sugar Smacks. Mmm, Sugar smacks…
As an adult, I try to be a little more sensible with cereals, so I bade farewell to my buddies Cap’n Crunch and Count Chocula. To be fair, skipping Cap’n Crunch has saved me from countless mouth lacerations.
One of my go-to healthier picks now is Cheerios, which is recent years has expanded into a Cheerios Empire, with more flavours than you can shake a stick made out of whatever passed for those weird crunchy “marshmallows” in Count Chocula. I have not tried every flavour, and the sugar content ranges from almost none to first five ingredients.
Here is how I rank Cheerios, of the ones I’ve tried:
- Multigrain Cheerios. This is probably the closest to pure Cheerios while adding a bit more variety. It’s also the lowest in sugar to the original. It tastes good, but not so good that I will eat half a box at one sitting.
- Original Cheerios. Something about the blandness of having nothing added accentuates the simple oat flavour. As a bonus, it has almost no sugar and because its flavour is merely pleasant, I don’t gorge on it.
- Chocolate Cheerios. Not as high in sugar as you’d think. It is sweet, but not overly so and, of course, you end up with chocolate milk in the bowl. Yum! An occasional treat.
- Honey Nut Cheerios. I actually haven’t tried this in years, but I remember it being sweet, but not too sweet. I may have had a less discerning palate back in the olden days, though. It ranks lower because of the sugar/honey content, and I haven’t felt compelled to try it again due to that.
- Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I finally tried these recently. The sugar content is on the higher side. It tastes heavy, somehow. I would not gorge on this, nor do I think I would try it again. If it was Cheerios with a hint of apple and cinnamon flavouring (like, aimed at adults), I’d probably like it a lot more.
There are a billion other flavours out there, because it seems like they’re throwing a lot out there to see what sticks, but these are the ones I’ve tried.
For the cereal curious, the other cereals I eat semi-regularly are:
- Crispix (low sugar, light and crunchy)
- Reese Peanut Butter Puffs (guilty pleasure, but lower in sugar than you might think)
- Rice Chex (like Crispix, but Crispix is better)