Nothing could be more heinous than the concept of a breakfast ‘on the go’, so I have to admit that I’d got it in for breakfast bars before I even examined the ingredients list. However, having done so, I can confirm that they are an abomination on two counts. Firstly, they suggest that you should be doing something more useful with your life than taking the time to eat properly. Secondly, they are full of ingredients that are not going to get your day off to a good start.
A breakfast bar is a compressed bowl of sugary cereal, minus the bowl, and the milk, but with the addition of vegetable oil to glue the cereal and sugar together. Ok, some might contain some dried fruit, but that is all I can find to commend them. They also frequently contain various forms of sugar, including glucose-fructose syrup (see a previous rant, below), which in terms of damage to health I put on a par with hydrogenated fat. Then there is the refined vegetable oil. I mentioned these in my earlier discussion of margarines and spreads, but just to recap: these refined oils have been heated to very high temperatures, de-gummed, bleached and deodorised to such an extent that they have virtually no nutritional value but plenty of potential harmful effects – heating these polyunsaturated oils to a very high temperature generates free radicals, those damaging chemicals linked to cancer, heart disease and premature ageing.