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Ultra-processed cereals have ruled the breakfast table for decades. The MAHA movement hopes to return the meal to its traditional staples.
America’s affection for breakfast cereal dates back to 1863, when a New York nutritionist formulated a recipe that included graham flour nuggets so hard they had to be soaked in milk overnight.
Dr. James Caleb Jackson called the creation granula, which he made for patients at his medical sanitarium in Dansville.
It was supposed to be a healthy food—lighter and easier to digest than traditional breakfast staples such as steak and eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, and hash. It also offered convenience. Just pour it from a box into a bowl and douse it with milk.
Jackson’s pioneering breakfast food led to an industry worth billions. But more than a century later, under wide-ranging health reforms led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy and others in the Trump administration, the federal government is advising Americans to go back to steak and eggs.
Breakfast has been called the most important meal of the day, but over the decades, the meal’s staples have shifted from made-from-scratch items to processed options such as cereals, many containing lots of added sugar.
Kennedy has blamed the rise in obesity and chronic disease in the United States on ultra-processed foods, which are often—like breakfast cereal—cheap, shelf-stable, and ready to eat with minimal effort.
Most calories consumed by Americans now come from ultra-processed foods, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission has warned that such diets lead to nutrient depletion, increased intake of calories, and exposure to harmful additives.
It’s urging a shift toward minimally processed whole foods.
In January, Kennedy unveiled a new food pyramid and guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits.
The new guidelines encourage eating what he calls “real food” and discourage consuming processed foods and products with added sugar.
“Many cereals are loaded with so much sugar that it’s like eating dessert for breakfast,” Dr. Cate Shanahan said. “Some of them are marketed as healthy, but they cause issues with blood sugar levels, crash your energy, and can create long-term health risks.”
Shanahan is the author of multiple New York Times best-selling books, including “Deep Nutrition,” “Food Rules,” “The Fatburn Fix,” and “Dark Calories.”
She is about to debut an eight-week course on how to recognize processed foods and implement healthy “real food” alternatives in one’s diet.
The Case Against Sugar-Coated Cereal
“When you eat food that is fortified synthetically and then sweetened, that leads to blood sugar spikes, metabolic stress, and nutrient imbalances, because it doesn’t have the natural nutrients,” Kendall Mackintosh, an integrative and functional nutritionist based in Bethesda, Maryland, told The Epoch Times.
“The timeline of the rising chronic disease epidemic correlates with an increased reliance on processed foods as we got busier as a society and focused more on convenience than nutrition.”
“We’ve been consuming this ultra- processed food, which I call human petfood,” Dr. Shawn Baker told The Epoch Times. A former orthopedic surgeon and world champion athlete, he’s the author of “The Carnivore Diet” and cofounder of the online clinic Revero.
“A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them.”
Consuming an abundance of addictive, ultra-processed food—high in carbs, sugars, and seed oils—drives inflammation and can lead to obesity, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular problems, gut malfunction, depression, and cancers, he said.
—Jeff Louderback; Stacy Robinson
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