When I was diagnosed I started off, on the advice of a diabetes nurse, regularly eating a high carb – mostly porridge – breakfast :x . I am now mostly having a cooked, very low carb, breakfast but I am also interested in quick alternatives – and the Flax-Z-Snax hot cereal from the http://www.lowcarbmegastore.com/breakfast Low Carb Megastore seemed worth a try.
Nutrition
There are many flavours available – the only one that I have tried is Butter Pecan. If you make this up as suggested then a serving has 12g carbohydrate, with no sugars at all. It also has 10g fibre, 13g protein and 7g unsaturated fat. A typical instant porridge will have about 16-18g carbohydrate with less than 0.5g sugar. The amount of total fibre and fat is pretty similar, although they do have slightly lower protein.
Reading the ingredients, I was a bit disappointed – it is lower carb than porridge but not by as much as I hoped. However, for me, it does seem to have an extremely low GI – a bowl of this stuff raising my BG by about 0.5 mmol/l, peaking after an hour and dropping back to the baseline within 2 hours. I don’t know why this is, may be it is the type of fibre (they don’t give a breakdown), or maybe the relatively high protein content.
Taste
The word that springs to mind is “worthy”. Although it isn’t actually unpleasant, eating it certainly isn’t much fun – the flavouring can’t hide the fact that its main ingredients are wheat bran and flax seed meal, and this definitely results in something that reminds me too much of sawdust. The packet suggests adding butter and milk - I daresay that improves it somewhat, but haven’t tried yet.
Cost
A bag that contains 10 servings costs £5.65 (plus postage). This compares with about £1.80 for 12 sachets of instant porridge in my local supermarket – so this is roughly four times the price, not cheap!
Conclusions
If you want healthy food that really tastes like its doing you good, then this might fit the ticket. It is quite expensive, though, and I don’t think I could face it every day.
Nutrition
There are many flavours available – the only one that I have tried is Butter Pecan. If you make this up as suggested then a serving has 12g carbohydrate, with no sugars at all. It also has 10g fibre, 13g protein and 7g unsaturated fat. A typical instant porridge will have about 16-18g carbohydrate with less than 0.5g sugar. The amount of total fibre and fat is pretty similar, although they do have slightly lower protein.
Reading the ingredients, I was a bit disappointed – it is lower carb than porridge but not by as much as I hoped. However, for me, it does seem to have an extremely low GI – a bowl of this stuff raising my BG by about 0.5 mmol/l, peaking after an hour and dropping back to the baseline within 2 hours. I don’t know why this is, may be it is the type of fibre (they don’t give a breakdown), or maybe the relatively high protein content.
Taste
The word that springs to mind is “worthy”. Although it isn’t actually unpleasant, eating it certainly isn’t much fun – the flavouring can’t hide the fact that its main ingredients are wheat bran and flax seed meal, and this definitely results in something that reminds me too much of sawdust. The packet suggests adding butter and milk - I daresay that improves it somewhat, but haven’t tried yet.
Cost
A bag that contains 10 servings costs £5.65 (plus postage). This compares with about £1.80 for 12 sachets of instant porridge in my local supermarket – so this is roughly four times the price, not cheap!
Conclusions
If you want healthy food that really tastes like its doing you good, then this might fit the ticket. It is quite expensive, though, and I don’t think I could face it every day.
