Bad ideas in breakfast

I spend a lot of time thinking about breakfast.  I know that in my lifetime I have gone through many phases of favorite breakfast foods, adopting some product or preparation as my default and eating it every day for weeks or months.  At least before I retired, breakfast was one of the most stressful meals of the day.  Being getting-up-challenged, I was always running late, always under pressure, always willing to trade off a decent breakfast for an extra ten minutes in bed.  Even when I took the time to eat something, I rarely sat down to do so. 

I know this pattern is not a healthy one.  Now that I live a life of alleged leisure, I eat better at breakfast, if only because I can take my time about it.  But I'm still interested in (and often concerned about) the things that the Big Food Industry tries to sell us for breakfast.

Here's what I found on prominent display the other day in our deli/bakery department:

I looked more closely to see what this product was.

"A healthy and delicious way to start your day" -- well, maybe delicious, but hardly healthy.  Check out the label:

How about those carbs?  If you're trying to lose weight, this could be your entire daily dose of carbohydrate, or even twice your daily dose. 

By contrast, a big bowl of steelcut oatmeal has 27 grams of carbs, and 1 gram of sugar -- half the fat of the breakfast cookie, and only 5% of the sugar.

One cookie has 320 calories, with 100 of them from fat.  By contrast, the oatmeal has 150 calories, with 25 of them from fat.  Even if you pour some decadent "fat-free half-and-half" over the top, you'll add 50 calories, with zero from fat.

Heck, you might as well just eat a regular oatmeal cookie -- 218 calories, 80 of them from fat, and a tad less sodium.

But of course, it's hard to eat a bowl of oatmeal in the car while you're driving.  Or to keep it in your desk drawer for days when you arrive at work unfed and cranky.

Nevertheless, I think this is on balance a bad idea.