The Healthiest Corn Cereal
Shereen Jegtvig
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and since most of us look for simple foods that can be prepared quickly, breakfast cereals are popular. Just pour some cereal in a bowl and add some milk. The best cereals are made from whole-grains such as wheat, oats or corn (half of your daily servings of breads and cereals should be whole-grain). Wait! Did I say corn? That’s right, corn counts as a whole-grain.
Most corn cereals are fortified with vitamins and minerals, which is fine, but many of them are also high in sugar, especially kids’ cereals like frosted flakes and corn puffs. You have to read the labels to find the healthiest choices. But we can use the FoodEssentials database to take a look at some corn cereals to see which are the best varieties. We’ll look at sugars, colorings, fiber and sodium.
Sugars
We have 13 cereals that contain corn in our database. We’ll start by looking at the number of grams of sugar in 100 grams of each cereal.
You can see there is quite a difference from the cereal with the least sugar, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, to the cereal with the most sugar Malt-O-Meal Frosted Flakes. I like to keep sugar to less than five grams per serving, so both the Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes and Crispix Corn & Rice qualify, and the Glucerna Crunchy Flakes ‘n Almonds is close at 6 grams sugar per serving.
Colorings
Americans don’t seem to care for bland colors at breakfast time so many cereals contain added colorings. Some natural colorings may be fine, but no one needs artificial colorings. You can find the colorings listed with the ingredients on the food label.
Only the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes is free from added colorings. If you click on the individual cereals, you’ll see that Malt-O-Meal Colossal Crunch, and Berry Colossal Crunch contain artificial colorings. The other brands use vitamins and other natural colorings for their cereals.
Fiber
Many Americans need more dietary fiber so choosing a high-fiber breakfast cereal can add to the daily total. Look for cereals that have at least five grams fiber per serving.
The Glucerna Crunchy Flakes ‘n Raisins, Crunchy Flakes ‘n Strawberries and Crunchy Flakes ‘n Almonds are all high in fiber.
Sodium
You don’t need added sodium in your breakfast cereal, so let’s see how much sodium our corn cereals contain.
The Kellogg’s Corn Pops and Frosted Flakes contain the least amounts of sodium.
And the Winner Is…
The Kellogg’s Corn Flakes are simple and rank at the top of most of our categories. The Glucerna brand cereals are also very good. Any of these cereals with some sliced fresh fruits or berries and low-fat milk would make a good healthy, high-fiber breakfast. The rest just contain too much sugar for me to consider them to be good choices.
Learn More About Your Favorite Cereals
Use our Foodessentials database to explore other types of cereals:
High Fructose Corn Syrup Free Cereal – Wheat
Cereal – Rice containing Colors
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