9.12.08

The Fiber Slide Warning

I am a big touter of fiber, and one of my biggies is Fiber One Original cereal, containing in each half-cup serving 57% of your daily fiber and hardly a pittance of sugar or fat along with a bonus of some key vitamins, minerals and protein. It is a breakfast worth eating. But you needn't go further than the back of the box to get other great uses – in salads, in trail mix, even ground up and used as bread crumbs. All great ways to get some of that concentrated, healthy fiber in you (or others).

But you've heard that from me before. Now here's my warning. Don't let the richness of this one Fiber One product fool you. It is not that deep a brand. Its other cereals all have lower fiber contents per CUP than the Original does in HALF a cup. They all also have higher sugar content and less other redeeming traits. Even despite all this, they still go ahead and advertise the fiber content on the front of the box in the same manner as the original, leading you to believe it is a per half cup serving rather than a per cup serving.

Then there are the breakfast bars, with 35% per little bar, which are high fiber for their size, but are still pretty high in sugar. Those bars and the cereals are okay but not great. The truly lousy products, which are allowed to slide only by virtue of being under the Fiber One name, are the yogurts and the pop tarts. Each have pretty low fiber content relative to the Original and still advertise fiber in the same place to remind consumers of the product it's piggybacking upon. The yogurts are not even worth it, as they seemed like nothing more than a yogurt with some fiber powder (Bene-fiber) mixed in. Small, expensive, sugary and unexciting. The pop tarts, I believe, are actually a ploy. They don't even have that much fiber, at 25%, but taste pretty cardboard-ish and have the relative misfortune of carrying many of the same other nutritional characteristics as traditional Kellogg’s Pop Tarts. Not good. Plus they're a rip-off.

So if you're looking for some great ways to add fiber to your life, grab a box of the Original Fiber One and do something creative with it – remember, a little goes a long way. Don't bother allowing the other Fiber One products to slide on the fiber and the other peripherals nutritionals by grabbing on the coattails of the Original.

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