Make Over Monday
What millennial doesn’t remember Saturday mornings as a bowl of cereal in front of the the TV for Saturday morning cartoons! Cap’n Crunch, Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, if only our parents realized how much sugar we were consuming while waiting for Captain Planet to save the day!
This weeks featured data set for Make Over Monday comes from a Kaggle data set that features data on 80 cereals.
My approach was to provide a quick snapshot of key nutritional information you should consider when picking out breakfast.
The “Calories” panel is to highlight that each manufacture provides cereals with nearly the same average calories. With calories being fairly even across the manufacturers I wanted to dive deeper into what you are getting in that 100 calorie bowl of cereal.
That’s where we shift our focus to the “Sugar” panel. While you may be getting the same amount of calories per serving across the manufacturers, some are providing a lot more sugar per serving than others.
When we focus in on the manufacturer that provides the least sugar and the most fiber per serving we see that across the board their cereals are low sugar high fibar wheat based cereals.
Next let’s drill down on the manufacture that has the highest average amount of sugar in their cereals. immediately you may recognize a childhood favorite, such as Fruity Pebbles, or Honey comb, you also might get a nostalgic memory of the following sugar rush!
While these high sugar cereals are driving the average up, you will also notice that there are no cereals in this list that have 0 grams of sugar, with the lowest cereals coming in at 3 grams of sugar per serving.
We have already seen the line up for most fibrous cereals, they were also our lowest sugar cereals, no surprise there. Now let’s focus in on the manufacturer that had the lowest average fiber content for their cereals. Again we see some high sugar childhood super stars such as Cocoa Puffs and Trix, and very little in the way of low sugar options, namely we have Cheerios.
There are may approaches that you can take when deciding on best dietary practices, and the “best” approach should be tailored to every individual. However, based on the data provided I believed that a quick and easy view of sugar and fiber would be a good starting point.
Did you participate in Make Over Monday? I would love to see what you did with this data, share a link to your viz in the comments below.