Fiber One Products

[mcel33]

I'm going onto phase 2 in two days and I'm preparing to add back high fiber carbs in the morning.

I planned on using several of the Fiber One products for breakfast, but I'm not a 100% sure they are SBD approved, since some (or possibly all) contain HFCS.

Are these products allowable once a day for breakfast?? Please help, I love my Fiber One!!

[RedRox]

First of all my own personal opinion is that HFCS is not the great evil many make it out to be. It is sugar and is basically the equivalent in terms of fructose/glucose percentages to regular table sugar, aka sucrose. We do try to limit added sugars but they are OK in some things and not in others. Cold cereals in the past have been one area where higher amounts of added sugars were allowed. You didn't post any ingredients or nutritional label info so let's revew the history of the cold cereal guidelines as they have changed 3 times now since the original program first came out.

Here is the first set of guidelines for cereals:

Cereal (Original Guideline)
- Choose whole grain and slow-cooking varieties (no instant types) with 6-8 grams of fiber or more per serving
- Hot- 1/3-1/2 cup, uncooked
- Cold - 30 grams/1 ounce/3/4 cup

Then Dr. A went into business with Kraft to produce SB branded products including cold cereals. Problem was none of them met their own fiber requirements. Oh what to do, what to do... Hey, we make the cereal and set the guidelines, let's just revise the guidelines!

Cold (Previous guideline) - 30 grams/1 ounce/3/4 cup. Varieties with 3.0 - 4.9 grams are “good” sources of fiber. “High” fiber cereals have 5.0 grams of fiber or more per serving. Choose a cereal with enough fiber to be at least on the upper end of “good,” and make sure it has less than 8 grams of sugar per serving.

I think that one worked pretty well and adds an important qualifier in terms of amounts of sugars per the recommended serving sizes listed above. Note that the amount on the cereal box for a recommended serving and what is included in the nutrtional label might be higher and you may need to get out a calculator to convert back to comparable portions to compare them.

And given that that one helped identify both minimums for fiber and maximums for sugar, it seems the easiest one to work with.

But no need to stop there when you can take a good guideline and make it more confusing! So in the latest book there is apparently this new guideline for cold cereals.

COLD: choose low sugar with 5g or more fiber per serving

great, but what the hey qualifies as "low sugar"? I have no clue. I do like the idea of keeping sugars lower or equal to fiber though as fiber content will help slow the absorption/conversion of the sugars to blood glucose, so if those stay in proportion to each other or in favor of more fiber, it should help limit the insulin response cycle.

Finally this list of cold cereals came from either a Daily Dish newsletter or the paid site from 2004 so would have fallen under the original guidelines and Fiber One is on it, so would assume the plain one is fine. I'm not sure what you meant by the various Fiber One products, so if it some other newer version, I'd go back to the guidelines above, adjust the nutritional panel info for comparable serving sizes and see which ones match up well and which ones don't.

Here's that list of originally recommended cold cereals with suggested serving sizes.

Cold Cereals (with suggested serving sizes):
Uncle Sam Cereal (1 cup)
Kellogg's All Bran Original (1/2 cup)
Post Shredded Wheat & Bran (1 1/4 cup)
Kellogg's All Bran Extra Fiber (1/2 cup)
Post Bran Buds (1/3 cup)
Post 100% Bran Cereal (1/3 cup)
General Mills Fiber One (1/2 cup)
Kashi Good Friends (3/4 cup)
Kashi GoLean (3/4 cup)

[mcel33]

Thanks for attempting to clear this up! lol Gosh, it IS confusing!

Anyway, when I said Fiber One products, I'm talking about their several varieties. I know they have cereal bars, and pancake, muffin and baking products.

Guess I'm just going to have to read labels even better than I did before.

Thanks again.