Breakfast cereals for children?

[amyboo]

Just wondering if anyone has any ideas: DS (nearly 2) has seemingly got bored with his morning bowl of weetabix, and I don't really know what other cereal is low enough in sugar to give him (he has enough energy and really doesn't need more!). I'm not entirely anti-sugar, but I just know that a lot of cereals have hidden sugar and salt in them... He seems to really like my crunchy museli with dried fruits and I ended up giving him a bowl this morning. Is it OK to give small kids museli? I wasn't sure. He's not a huge fan of Cheerios, but will eat porridge. What others are OK to give him?

I'd like to carry on giving him cereal (rather than toast or fruit/yogurt) as he is addicted to both of those things and gets enough of them later in the day!

DD has just right (in a green box.)

it has fruit in and its a bran cereal

Ok actual suggestions:

I make whole oat groat porridge (can be made with whole spelt, pot barley etc) - a few cups of groats plus water in the slow cooker in the evening (they need a long time to soak) then set the timer on the slow cooker plug to switch it on around 4am...it is perfect and ready to go at breakfast time. Just as quick as cereal. My kids have it with raw honey, apricots (unsulphored), raisins, nuts and cream (raw if i can get it, organic if not).

Soft boiled egg and wholemeal soldiers covered in proper, organic butter. Really doesn't take long and again if you give them no choices its a breeze as you're not having to juggle 3 different orders!

Scrambled eggs (sometimes duck eggs) with ham or sausage (left from dinner night before) or beans or sometimes just plain on toast.

Plain, natural organic yoghurt with bananas or pears etc.

Cheese and bacon omellette.

wholemeal pancakes with raisins and honey.

They frequently have a glass of raw milk with an egg yolk in (say if its a day when they just have toast and honey)

This really isn't time consuming stuff. I'm not cooking souffles ffs!

oh and Full English on a Sunday.

DS actually eats a lot of the above mentioned, especially soft boiled eggs with brown soldiers, and natural yogurt. He also eats shreddies and weetabix. It's not all or nothing. Balance is the key I agree...

Perhaps not that time consuming, (although plenty of us get up early enough thank you and are rushed in the morning as it is so kindly stop suggesting that we are all lazy) but rather more expensive than value porridge oats and other cereals and I'm afraid that does bloody matter. We eat good, unmessed with, freshly cooked food the rest of the time. We eat ham and eggs etc for lunch rather than breakfast. We get through vats and vats of (mostly) homemade yoghurt with fruit.

You need to accept that we all have different priorities. None of us is willfully shovelling crap down our dcs, we all feed them as best we can, it is just that most of us have to strike a balance somewhere and for most of us it just works out better on the whole to give a quick, healthy-ish breakfast than fanny around with anything more complicated.

Sounds nice, Clarry. I'd eat it. But my mother's TB has left me wary of bring blase about that particular risk to the DCs (the treatment was a whole lot of no fun for some years), so no raw milk here.

Unfortunately one DS would really, genuinely starve rather than eat anything at all from your list (tested to the point that a paed told us to forget our food principles and get some chocolate HobNobs down the child if that was all he could face).

I expect you'd say that a better diet would cure his psychological difficulties. Difficult one to test, really.

Personally i think cereals are incredibly expensive. Im not interested in calorific value against cost but nutritional density and quality against cost.

I've lived entirely on benefits and still bought all organic and whole foods to cook from scratch.

We've been lied to that our world consists of choices. It is not a question of choices or priorities that each family must make for themselves. If you buy shit food for your kids and instead spend the money on expensive clothes, computers and other non-essentials you're a moron. plain and simple.

And i think many parents, whilst not willfully, are knowingly feeding crap to their kids and convincing themselves that diet has no affect on anything other than their income. They will happily gobble up the advice of poorly informed M.Ds who say 'oh that has nothing to do with diet, oh and that is incurable etc etc.' because it alleviates the guilt.

I cannot stress the point any further - food has changed so so much in the last decade. it is not the same. not even the food you think is food, because it looks like food...its not. we think we can feed our children this shit and they'll be ok because we were ok on it. but we didn't grow up on it and it is not ok.

Clarry, why is raw egg yolk better than cooked? I'm still worried by the whole salmonella business - but I suppose that bought eggs are guaranteed salmonella free and I always assume my own chicken eggs are OK because I put no animal produce back into the food chain.Is eating raw egg yolk safe? (genuine question,by the way)

You can buy 'baby muesli' I think it comes from 'Goodness Direct' online, I will see if I can find a link. You can give muesli but be careful with large nuts (choking risk) so you may want to fish them out and chop them up.

What about ham/cheese tosti or brown bread with cheese.

This muesli has no large bits/nuts etc is also very good quality.

well, as safe as anything else i suppose. All food, even salad (infact in some cases especially salad) has the potential to kill or make you seriously ill. Its just we hear about some health scares or epidemics and not others. provided you're not actively ingesting poison i will always take my chances with good quality food rather than take my chances with shit. Beef for example- I always buy grass fed beef since that is a cows natural food. grain fed cows can have nearly 20% more e-coli in their guts. TB in raw milk wasn't due to milk being raw but poor hygiene standards during milking and, again, improper food fed the cows. Pasteurized milk is just as likely to give you TB as its entirely down to how clean the farm is. Raw milk farms are more regularly inspected so you're probably safer with raw.

egg and milk used to be a very common drink given to kids...my grandparents were brought up on it and my partners grandparents. raw food generally is better for you and more easily digested. Alot of vitamins, enzymes and minerals etc. can be denatured or destroyed when cooked.

I pay no attention to government health scares. They're frequently full of scare mongering shite and conveniently forget to mention all the things that are actually bad for us.

Going back to the OP, if you're looking for something low in sugar, muesli is not it! Generally higher in sugar than stuff Luke Cherelle and shreddies.

It depends on the type of muesli, the swiss muesli in my link has no added sugar. It does contain sugar from the fruit. Any fruit contains sugar, that is not really an issue. Many supermarket mueslis do contain a lot of added sugar though, so it is a matter of reading the labels. Otherwise ordinary brown bread or plain cornflakes/rice crispies with milk (mind you milk also contains natural sugars ... almost everything does).

my kids (almost 2 and almst 3.5) are addicted to Special K... so they have their own packet (original) and i have mine (berries)...

Thanks ClarryKitten. I did read a while ago that the best breakfast (in terms of keeping you fuller for longer) is ham and cheese etc like the German breakfasts. I'm trying to cut down on how much meat we eat though, especially ham and sausage. I also don't have a slow cooker but will look into your other suggestions. I read that babies shouldn't have too much fibre so now my youngest is 1 I'm thinking more about what we're eating.
We have to leave the house seriously early (with 3 under 4's) so time is really pushed, I get up early enough as it it!

I want to have serious words with the kids I see walking to school eating chocolate and crisps, and the other day I'm sure I saw a kids with chippy chips!!

This is a link to a pretty opinonated article about the amount of sugar in cereals that might not always be obvious (sometimes as much as 3 teaspoons per bowl) it's taken from a Which report. You can read the original report if you google it, it looks at different types of cereals and the best and worst offenders but its quite long. I've struggled to find any cereal which is sugar free (apart from expensive over packaged Ella's kitchen) and am put off by the highly processed nature of cereals and feel they have to be fortified in order to put in some of the goodness that has been stripped out in the manufacturing process.
I don't like to give my 15month old too much wheat, rice products or eggs as she is often constipated so any ideas? Shes not too keen on porridge, we do lots of yoghurt and fruit....maybe it's as one poster suggested and luch for breakfast!
www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2107361/Sugary-breakfast-cereals-1-Britains-leading-consumer-experts-reveals-shocking-truth.html

this is a year old thread - may have been better starting your own one

p.s. ready brek and porridge are sugar free - you can add fruit to add flavour. Weetabix has low salt/sugar

My 5yo and 2yo have:
plain cornflakes mixed with nut honey cornflakes 50/50
shreddies with fruit inside
home cooked porridge with raisins, apples, coconut flakes, frozen raspberries or other similar options
boiled eggs
scrambled eggs with a bit of smoked salmon (DC1)

Basically I try to cook porridge at least every second day...

I just have to comment on this! I raised two children (now 22 and 29) and getting healthy food / god intestinal flora going has made thme hugely heathly, happy and much better on all accounts than many of their peers. Maybe Sally Fallon has not beeen found to be scientic YET but the truth is we better look to traditional ways of eating to generate health. Pasta, cereal, sugar and processed meat hasn't done it. Certainlt science tells us that!