Breakfast cereals or toast are what many people in the UK consider the right thing to start the day with, and cereal manufacturers work hard to make sure that their products are embedded in our food culture. But there's a problem with this received wisdom: cereals are made mostly from grains, and grains break down into glucose. Glucose is a sugar, and when the sugar (glucose) we eat arrives in the bloodstream, it has all kinds of effects on the body depending on how efficiently it is dealt with. Straight out of the gate is an effect involving a metabolic [...]

Earlier in the year (7th March) was "World Cereal Day", when food companies extolled the virtues of consuming ultra-processed foods for the "most important meal of the day". Many of us in the Western world already need no persuasion: 46% of Americans and 20% of British people start their day with breakfast cereals, and the British spoon £19 billion a year into the coffers of the grain processors. Cereals are big business! Little wonder that the industry is anxious to increase its share of the breakfast pie. Non-soak cereals first landed on the American breakfast table with John Harvey Kellogg's [...]