Boxed cold cereal and milk is pretty standard breakfast in America. It is easy, and kids love those sweet cereals. Many people think that boxed cold cereal is a well balanced meal, so that it is one of the best breakfasts you can have. Do you think is it true?
Most of the boxed cold cereals contain a lot of sugar, and high fructose corn syrup is often used. If you are consuming high sugar content food, your blood sugar increases rapidly, and your body start pumping up more insulin (so called ‘fat hormone”) than you normally need. As the result, the sugar becomes fat and stays around your belly.
Many people love the crunchiness of cereals. How they make it like that? Rice, wheat, or other grains are ground in to flour and mixed with water. The mixture is “processed into a slurry and placed in a machine called an extruder. The grains are forced out of a tiny hole at high temperature and pressure, which shapes them into little o’s or flakes or shreds. Individual grains passed through the extruder expand to produce puffed wheat, oats and rice. These products are then subjected to sprays that give a coating of oil and sugar to seal off the cereal from the ravages of milk and to give it crunch.
In his book Fighting the Food Giants, biochemist Paul Stitt describes the extrusion process, which treats the grains with very high heat and pressure, and notes that the processing destroys much of their nutrients. It denatures the fatty acids; it even destroys the synthetic vitamins that are added at the end of the process. The amino acid lysine, a crucial nutrient, is especially damaged by the extrusion process.
Even boxed cereals sold in health food stores are made using the extrusion process. They are made with the same kind of machines and mostly in the same factories. The only “advances” claimed in the extrusion process are those that will cut cost, regardless of how the process alters the nutrient content of the product. “ (1)
How about the nutrition? Most of boxed cold cereals are fortified with vitamins. “Fortified” means man made synthetic vitamins and they are not functioning nutrients. These fortified substances don’t work as well as the natural whole foods and in some cases are not good for us. Some expert says that the body is simply not designed to utilize the fortified nutrients and synthetic vitamins can also cause imbalances in the body that may lead to health problems in the long run.
NaturalNews says that “synthetic vitamin D is toxic and can result in permanent deposit of minerals in the heart, lungs and kidneys because it’s made from petroleum extracts, coal tar derivatives, and irradiated cattle brains. It may even contain formaldehyde and ammonia! “. (2)
Dr. Thomas Levy, a cardiologist says that the iron in the enriched boxed cold cereal is a metallic form of iron. He actually demonstrated in his video that METALLIC IRON FILINGS were pulled out of a popular breakfast cereal with a strong magnet! Dr. Levy added that “Iron, like any other nutrient, must be in a food-form, bioavailable state to be useful to the body. When it is not, it not only does little or no good, it can have its own direct toxicity.”
The last research I would like to share here is also from Sally Fallon. It is very shocking and disturbing. Here is the excerpt from her article. (1)
Let me tell you about two studies which were not published. The first was described by Paul Stitt who wrote about an experiment conducted by a cereal company in which four sets of rats were given special diets. One group received plain whole wheat, water and synthetic vitamins and minerals. A second group received puffed wheat (an extruded cereal), water and the same nutrient solution. A third set was given only water. A fourth set was given nothing but water and chemical nutrients.
The rats that received the whole wheat lived over a year on this diet. The rats that got nothing but water and vitamins lived about two months. The animals on water alone lived about a month. But the company’s own laboratory study showed that the rats given the vitamins, water and all the puffed wheat they wanted died within two weeks—they died before the rats that got no food at all. It wasn’t a matter of the rats dying of malnutrition. Autopsy revealed dysfunction of the pancreas, liver and kidneys and degeneration of the nerves of the spine, all signs of insulin shock.
Results like these suggested that there was something actually very toxic in the puffed wheat itself! Proteins are very similar to certain toxins in molecular structure, and the pressure of the puffing process may produce chemical changes, which turn a nutritious grain into a poisonous substance.
Another unpublished experiment was carried out in the 1960s. Researchers at Ann Arbor University were given 18 laboratory rats. They were divided into three groups: one group received corn flakes and water; a second group was given the cardboard box that the corn flakes came in and water; the control group received rat chow and water. The rats in the control group remained in good health throughout the experiment. The rats eating the box became lethargic and eventually died of malnutrition. But the rats receiving the corn flakes and water died before the rats that were eating the box! (The last corn flake rat died the day the first box rat died.) But before death, the corn flake rats developed schizophrenic behavior, threw fits, bit each other and finally went into convulsions. The startling conclusion of this study is that there was more nourishment in the box than there was in the corn flakes.
This experiment was actually designed as a joke, but the results were far from funny. The results were never published and similar studies have not been conducted.
So, do you still want to eat your cereal? They might comfort you but may be killing you slowly…
Source (1) http://www.westonaprice.org/modern-foods/dirty-secrets-of-the-food-processing-industry
Source (2) http://www.naturalnews.com/036650_synthetic_vitamins_disease_side_effects.html
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