My Top 3 Kid Friendly Healthy Breakfast Cereals

As much as I’d like Arabella to start each day with a spinach omelette and carrot juice or homemade granola, it’s not always viable or indeed desirable.   She, like her father, loves cereal, I love it as it’s convenient and it’s easy for her to feed herself.  I don’t however, love the huge amounts of sugar, and in some cases salt in about 95% of the cereals on my local supermarket shelves.

We all know that refined sugar does such a lot of harm to our waistlines, health and mental well being, yet we are so misinformed about what refined sugars are and where they are hidden, resulting in horribly addictive refined sugars being trustingly served for breakfast to kids everywhere!

i am the boring person who, when I have time, reads the nutrition labels of just about everything.  In my quest for having yummy cereal in the house, that I feel pleased to see my daughter (and husband) eat, I have spent too much time in the supermarket and health food shops reading labels and seen too many mouthfuls of puffed plain quinoa spat out.

Here are 3 facts:

• A 30g serving of Cheerios contains around 7g sugar.  That’s a teaspoon and a half.  Tantrum fuel.
• Frosties are over a third sugar, so in a small 30g bowl that’s around 12g of processed sugar. Almost 3 teaspoons.  Shouldn’t be legal.
• Consumption of sugar is linked to obesity, diabetes, some cancers, and heart disease (among lots of other things like decreased fertility, and increased behavioural problems in children).

These are just two examples, one not so surprising and one perhaps a little surprising for some.  These are marketed at children and at parents.  I would encourage everyone to take 30 seconds to read the back of their children’s cereal packets, and make an informed choice.

I have collated here, my top 3 very child friendly, delicious and importantly, healthy breakfast cereals.  All available at Sainsbury’s.

Rude Health Honey Puffed Oats

These do include honey, unrefined and very little of it, but it makes these very palatable and it’s what gets requested before we even get out of bed.  Honey is much easier for the body to process than refined sugar, and here it’s in a very small quantity.  I love that the only other ingredient here is oats, which are incredibly good for everyone, they are slow releasing energy, easy to digest and contain lots of lovely unprocessed fibre.  They are also gluten free, and while we are not coeliac, we do feel better when we have less.

Ready Brek

Again, a fabulous way to get oats in.  It’s a compromise as the oats are very finely milled which isn’t great (affects the quality of the fibre), but they have zero added sugar in any form, just don’t pick the other flavours!  Don’t put sugar on top, if you need to add interest and flavour, a good friend of mine hides blueberries in her son’s bowl, and that seems to work.

Alpha Bites Multigrain

These are sweetened with coconut blossom nectar, which is high in calcium and potassium and is naturally slower releasing energy than a more processed or refined sugar.  These are the sweetest of the three, and are multigrain and full of fibre.  These are the closest thing to a Cheerioesque healthy version, so if you are making a healthier choice for a sugar loving child, these might be a good first bet.