In my quest to change what I eat and model it mostly after the popular Mediterranean Diet, I’ve had to tinker with my breakfast routine. Before dietary changes I’d pour myself a bowl of Frosted Mini-Wheats with skim milk each morning, sometimes opting for Cheerios instead. I didn’t have a very exciting breakfast life before now, and what I really fixated on was getting the fiber from those Frosted Mini-Wheats to keep me regular and I just simply love milk. I’d drink another glass of skim milk before bed each night. Flash forward though, I’m getting complained at by my doctor after an A1C test about the whole spectrum of things from high cholesterol to elevated glucose. Changes needed to be made.
Frosted Mini-Wheats got thrust aside for two reasons. One reason was the obvious sugar coating. The other reason was that my new dietary plan would suddenly involve a lot of fiber from other sources, so it was no longer logical to eat the wheats. Skim milk wasn’t a huge offender since I was thankfully already a fan of it compared to fattier milks, but it also became time to try alternative milks. So I grabbed some cereal that was big puffy wheats again, but without the sugar. It was fine, but I needed to focus on the kind of fiber and I happened to be keeping an eye on vitamin D and iron input as well. The non sugared wheats didn’t really cut it compared to some other cereals. I tried some hard core bran cereals, they were slightly better alternatives. My goal was to still get fiber, but to get a good hit of specifically soluble fiber, since that’s the one that pulls the naughty cholesterol out of your body. Many cereals were purchased, but I kept seeing that oats outperform wheat cereals in this realm, which led me to trying the ever present in all grocery stores Quaker Oats. 4 grams of Dietary Fiber, and 2 grams of the desired Soluble Fiber. A fail on the Vitamin D though. I’ve seen all sorts of posts about the “Overnight Oats” fad where people take generic oats, shove them in a mason jar overnight with some milk or yogurt, maybe some fruit too, and after it sits all night in the refrigerator they get a lovely cold and kind of boring oat mush the next day to consume. This seems no more exciting to me than cooking oats in the fly in the morning, but I tried overnight oats anyway. No a fan. This wasn’t going to be palatable each day.
Wanting to keep with oats over wheat based cereal I found myself back at one of my normal foods, good old Cheerios! They are oats too! They taste better in my opinion than generic cooked oats or overnight oats. They are less hassle since they require no prep work. Here’s the real scoop though as I type this and I’ve got a box of Cheerios & a container of Quaker Oats in front of me: Cheerios has the same fiber contents as Quaker Oats. The oats have no vitamin D, but Cheerios have it. Cheerios has 12.6mg of iron per serving. The oats have 1.5mg of iron per serving. Both are fairly cost effective, but I’m a creature of routine, the Cheerios have the slight nutritional edge and I was eating them sometimes before this point anyway so they win. It’s just two different formats for oats, and I took the path that’s less hassle and more familiar.
Milk wise I also eyeballed oats and ended up I think buying the Walmart Great Value house brand of an unsweetened oat milk. This was not a very enjoyable experience and I found myself dreading breakfast. I was new to backing off of real milk though, so I might be a little dramatic about my feelings toward that stuff though. So I tried Silk’s unsweet Almond Milk. This is probably where I throw in a joke that neither oats nor almonds can be milked. But safe to say either of these “milk” options suffice diet wise for someone like me that wants to be somewhere adjacent to a Mediterranean Diet eating scenario. It’s important to grasp with these weird alternative milks that they’re just something or other super blended up and mixed with mostly water to give the illusion of being milk. Summing all that up, I don’t really love almond milk or anything, but I don’t hate it. So breakfast is now courtesy of the convergence of Cheerios and Silk in my bowl each morning, or you might think of it as oats and almonds coming together just well enough not to make me sad.
My choices are ultimately easy to find in just about any grocery store, and at least compared to what I was eating as described at the start of this long winded ramble, it’s a vast improvement. Bonus perk, Silk keeps a lot longer than normal milk, so I’m wasting less money with milk expiring. I also don’t drink milk before bed any longer because this just isn’t delicious enough, so it forced a habit change. I’m more prone to having water, which likely is where I should be anyway.
