Sophie Morris: 'Adding nuts and seeds to your breakfast is a really good hack'

Author Sophie Morris has all the tips to help us skip the UPF products - or switch them for something better - along with ideas for good things to make that are both delicious and nourishing

A leisurely weekend breakfast at home on a cold January morning is pure luxury — a slower, warmer start to the day as we look out at the cold, frozen world, no rushing for work or school, time to spend lingering at the table. But what will we eat? A glance at the list of ingredients on the back of a box of breakfast cereal can sometimes be enough to make you stop in your tracks.

With sugar appearing high up on the ingredients list of many family-favoured breakfasts, alongside other sugar sources such as invert sugar syrup, molasses, and caramelised sugar syrup, it’s no wonder that the Food Safety Authority of Ireland highlighted breakfast cereals in their latest report, Monitoring Sugar in Processed Foods. It found that ready-to-eat breakfast cereal had an average of 6.37g of sugar per suggested serving size, the equivalent of 1.6 teaspoons of sugar. To put that in context, confectionery came in at 7.61g, or 1.9 teaspoons of sugar per serving size.