How healthy are your ready-to-eat breakfast cereals?
Manufacturers say their products are high in carbohydrates, low in fat, with added vitamins and minerals. Health benefits, they say, include high-energy boosts for peak mental and physical performance, weight loss, and reduced risk of heart disease.
Market leader Bokomo even advertises its Pro Nutro as "the most nutritious family cereal in South Africa" - a claim contested by competitors, but sanctioned by the Advertising Standards Authority.
But, medical specialists say if you eat the cereals at all, you'd be wise not to do so regularly, and you shouldn't let your children eat them everyday.
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'You'd be wise not to do so regularly' They say we are being hoodwinked into believing the cereals are a healthy way to start the day. It's a common perception with particular appeal for harassed parents with picky mouths to feed on the run.
Concerns focus on refined, processed, sugared, salted products, especially brightly coloured ones. Experts say the nature of the cereals - high-carb, low fat content - creates conditions for the development of health problems they are supposed to prevent.
One vocal cereal antagonist is Dr Sterna Franzsen, a Pretoria general practitioner and gynaecologist who practises complementary medicine calls the cereals, including "natural" muesli products, "rubbish" and "windkos". She says they don't deserve to be called food, so far removed are they from their natural state.
Dr John Briffa is another. He is a medical doctor and one of Britain's foremost nutritional experts. He says the cereals "peddle fodder as food". The notion that we should eat them every day is driven "by the food industry, not science and our experience".
Far from helping us to slim, refined cereals can actually make us fat, Briffa says. Their high-carb content stimulates the body to manufacture fat, and reduces its fat-burning potential.
'The greatest scam in medicine's history'
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