Cereal selection

I’ve had many food conundra over the years, including peanut butter, pizza, and bread, among others, but I never expected to have one over my morning cereal. Fortunately, my testing provided the answer.

I have cereal for breakfast several times a week, something I’ve done since childhood. Several years ago, I bought Kellogg’s All-Bran cereal because I wanted to make some bran muffins for Nigel and me. I also had it as cereal because it is a good source of fibre, something that’s important, among other reasons, because it helps control cholesterol.

At some point, I started mixing it with lemon yoghurt and sliced banana, and I really liked it. In more recent years, I started to have the company’s All-Bran Flakes for variety, and sometimes, especially in winter, I had porridge (what in my corner of the USA was called “oatmeal”). The main consistent menu item was the All-Bran, though I had to give up on bananas when my blood pressure medication was changed to one that’s potassium-based (I’m supposed to be careful about potassium, apparently).

A long time ago, I learned that the fibre in my cereal is considered a “prebiotic” which feeds gut bacteria. The live cultures in the yoghurt, are probiotics, of course, which provide good gut bacteria, though somewhat different than the ones that normally live there (the ones in yoghurt generally help with digesting dairy, but they also assist the fibre in helping to keep one's “shipping department” to, um, empty…).

I genuinely liked the cereal, especially when combined with the lemon yoghurt, but it wasn’t perfect. For one thing, if I had it in milk instead of yoghurt it turned mushy pretty quickly. Also, a box seemed pretty expensive, especially as prices started rising, though I bought it anway.

A couple months ago, I was shopping at Woolworths and noticed they had an own-brand cereal that was similar to All-Bran, called “High Fibre Bran”. I was interested because the own-brand was $2.30 a box cheaper, which ain’t nothing. So, I decided to give it a try.

The first thing I noticed was that the box says “Delicious & Crunchy”, and when I tried it, I immediately agreed on the second part of the slogan: It was very crunchy. I tried it with milk, too, to see if it got soggy like All-Bran, and it didn’t. It’s the first part of the description I didn’t agree with: I did not find it “delicious”.

There’s an irony here: Many people I know personally have screwed up their faces at the mere mention of All-Bran, declaring, "it tastes like cardboard", which made me wonder how they knew that. As it turned out, once I tried the Woolworth’s cereal, I understood: It’s not necessary to actually taste cardboard to get the sense that something must tastes like cardboard would. To me, the High Fibre Bran was exactly like that. However: Just as I like All-Bran, which many people I know don’t like, it’s logical that other folks may love it. To each their own.

I finally ran out of the Woolworths cereal over the weekend and resumed having All-Bran. It turns out, though, they really are quite different.

Both cereals are made in Australia, presumably using some Australian ingredients, but their nutritional profiles are different. To compare products fairly, I never look at the nutritional information per “serving”, but rather per 100g. Since most values are expressed as weight in grams per 100g, that can give us a good idea of what percentage of the product is sugar, fat, etc.

Here’s how the two compare (information comes from their nutrition labels, and was correct at the time I was doing this test). Since they’re both “high fibre” cereals, I’ll start there: My regular brand, All-Bran (“AB”) has 28g of dietary fibre per 100g, and High Fibre Cereal (“HFC”) had a whopping 42.1g per 100g. Another thing I always look at is sugars, and AB has 15.7g of sugars, while HFC has 13.4g. I carefully watch sodium because of my specific health issues, and AB has 330mg of sodium, and HFC has 300mg. While I don’t personally pay that much attention to fat content, AB had total fat content of 3.6g, and HFC had 2.6g of total fat.

The bottom line for me is that High Fibre Cereal was better than All-Bran in all the things I monitor, however, the difference wasn’t necessarily huge, though, for me, the sodium difference is pretty significant. There’s also obviously a very big difference in dietary fibre, but I’m not certain I need that much fibre. Even so, I think it’s safe to say the name of their cereal, “High Fibre Bran”, is fully justified.

Cost was another motivator when I tried it, because All-Bran was $7.79 for a 530g box. The High Fibre Cereal was $5.50 for a 500g box. If High Fibre Cereal was sold in a 530g box, and the unit price didn’t change, it’d be $5.83, still around $2 a box cheaper than All-Bran.

Neither the difference in their nutritional profiles nor the different prices matters if I don’t like the cereal with the better profile and lower price. Facts. So, while the Woolworths own-brand has a better nutritional profile and costs less, I like All-Bran much better and I’ll stick with it. It’s only part of my weekly breakfast menu, anyway.

This was one of the rare times when I tried a new (to me) product not because I didn’t like my normal brand, but because I was curious if I’d like a similar alternative. Now I know. On to the next experiment!

This post has been updated. Follow the link to see the update.

Important Note: The names of brands/products/companies listed in this post are all registered trademarks, and are used here for purposes of description and clarity. No company or entity provided any support or payment for this blog post, and all products were purchased by me at normal consumer prices. So, the opinions I expressed are my own genuinely held opinions, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the manufacturers, any retailer, or any known human being, alive or dead, real or corporate. Just so we’re clear.