Breakfast is definitely a good idea. It sets you up with energy for the day, and can contribute to good health and nutrition. But it’s a meal that can easily fall by the wayside when you’re rushing to get out the door in the morning. And we’re not just talking about adults – a recent ABS survey found that 15% of school children were skipping breakfast.
There are a range of on-the-go breakfast options that cater to people who can’t seem to find time for a sit-down morning meal, but the breakfast biscuit category in particular appears to be growing. Marketed as “a great start to your day” and “energy for the whole morning”, breakfast biscuits appear to offer the whole package for busy people – tasty, shelf-stable and portable.
But can a bikkie make a good brekky? We’ve calculated the Health Star Ratings and listed the nutrition information for 16 different breakfast biscuit products across half a dozen brands in our nutrition table below.
The upside
Whole grains appear in the ingredients list of all the breakfast biscuits in our review. And based on the percentage of wholegrain content provided on the label, 13 of the 16 products meet the Grains and Legumes Nutrition Council Code of Practice requirements for a claim to be ‘very high in’ (at least 24g whole grain per serve), be ‘high in’ (at least 16g per serve) or ‘contain’ (at least 8g per serve) whole grain.
Australian Dietary Guidelines recommend that adults eat at least four to six serves of grain (cereal) foods – mostly wholegrain and/or high cereal fibre varieties – every day. And Scandinavian research recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition found that eating more wholegrains was associated with lower mortality rates in a study of over 120,000 people. So the percentage of wholegrains in a food is an important consideration when comparing and choosing products.
Additionally, most of the products we reviewed can – and do – claim to be a ‘source of fibre’, and contain at least the required minimum of 2g of dietary fibre in a serve. The belVita Fruit & Fibre product contains more than 4g of dietary fibre in a serve, which is a ‘good source’ according to the food standards code.
The downside
Breakfast biscuits are generally high in sugar. Dried fruit ingredients are contributing to the total amount in a few products, but in most cases it’s added sugars, which sometimes appear on the ingredients list more than once under a range of names (such as raw sugar, brown sugar, honey and golden syrup – see our article on how to identify added sugars in your food for more sneaky sweeteners).
Butter and coconut also feature high up on the ingredients list in several products, and while they may benefit the taste, their inclusion also bumps up these products’ saturated fat content (and subsequently lowers their Health Star Rating).
And where most breakfast cereals are fortified with micronutrients such as folate, iron and B vitamins – which can get you on track to meet your daily requirement of these nutrients – only the Sanitarium biscuits in our review even mention added vitamins and minerals on their label (because Weet-Bix, which is fortified, is an ingredient). And of course, when you opt for a breakfast biscuit you’re also missing out on the calcium and additional protein you’d get from the milk you’d be adding to your cereal.
The fact that the belVita packaging suggests that a balanced breakfast consists of a serve of its biscuits in addition to a plain low-fat dairy product (for calcium intake), a piece of fruit (for vitamins) and a tea or a coffee (for hydration) says it all. So much for breakfast on the run!
The verdict
Breakfast biscuits are convenient, but if you can set aside a few extra minutes to sit down for a bowl of good quality breakfast cereal – perhaps with some fresh fruit and yoghurt – you can be nutritionally better off.
