No aisle sells health harder than breakfast cereal. Whole grain claims, vitamin badges, smiling suns. We ran the 403 cereals in our database through our checks, and the packaging is writing cheques the ingredients cannot cash.
Keto: 5 out of 403
Cereal is, by construction, refined carbohydrate. Just five products stay under our threshold of 10g carbs per 100g. A typical corn flake sits around 80g. The "no added sugar" varieties do not help: the base grain is the carbohydrate, the sugar is a bonus on top.
Gluten-free: a coin flip
199 of the 403 fail a gluten-free check outright, and the failures are not just the obvious wheat cereals. The recurring trap is malt: barley malt and malt extract flavour a huge share of corn and rice cereals, the ones that look safest. Malt appears in 1,189 products across our database, and cereal is one of its favourite hiding places. A corn flake with barley malt extract is not gluten-free, no matter what the front of the box implies.
Vegan: read for honey and milk
97 cereals pass our vegan check, 155 fail, and 151 are uncertain. The two ingredients doing most of the failing are milk derivatives in "cluster" and granola styles, and honey, which appears on 1,133 products in our database and loves a cereal box.
Our advice for this aisle
Ignore the front of the box entirely. The three things worth reading are the carbohydrate line, the allergen box, and the word "malt" anywhere in the ingredients. Or check the specific product in our cereal listings before you go shopping.