The best breakfast cereals for your health – and the ones to avoid

Take niacin (vitamin B3), a vital vitamin in the correct quantities that is added to many cereals. A recent study has shown links between excess levels of niacin and a raised risk of heart attacks, strokes and cardiac conditions. Another study, in the journal General Psychiatry, looked at thiamine (vitamin B1) – an important nutrient that’s boosted in breakfast cereals. People who ate large amounts, above 1mg a day, showed increased rates of cognitive decline, the confusion and memory loss that blights old age for many. 

A 30g portion of Rice Krispies, fortified with thiamin, provides 0.27mg, potentially useful. However, there are plenty of other places, such as peas, bananas and wholemeal bread, where you might be getting enough already. And anyway, who eats the tiny portions that are recommended by the manufacturers? I weighed out the correct amount of each of the 14 cereals I tried, and frankly I’ve got egg cups that hold more than some of them. 

Eating too much is particularly tempting with those cereals which fall into the ultra-processed food (UPF) category, which is any of them which are made using processes you couldn’t replicate at home, and contain ingredients you couldn’t buy in the supermarket. These temptingly marketed cereals are often hard to stop eating. In a House of Lords select committee last month, anti-UPF campaigner Dr Chris Van Tulleken held up a packet of Coco Pops and argued that big industry was peddling addictive products much like the tobacco industry. The packet of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes sums it up in letters 4cm high: “The trouble is they taste too good.”