I wish there was a way to answer that appropriately in the space of a comment. Regarding nutrition, this is what I tell people to start with: http://www.amazon.ca/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-Gr...

It's a great book, and more accessible than you might think.

I prefer to read biochemistry books. this is my current bible http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-G...

Every single hospital-ward double blind clinical trial over the last 100 years says exactly the same thing: net energy balance is what determines how fat you are, no matter the macronutrient content of the diet.

Nutrition's role in lifelong health is a LOT more complicated. What your lifetime Vitamin D levels probably matters a lot. But over a lifetime, eating a diet of mostly whole foods, and in amounts scaled to activity is going to give you benefits that will completely drown out what kind of fat you ate over the last 30 years or if you ate pop tarts for breakfast.

My point is, if you're fat and unfit, it's not any particular macronutrient's fault.

In the 1930s to 1950s, anything starchy was bad for you (Ask your grandmother) - In the 1950s - 1980s fat became the new evil. Then it was cholesterol, and saturated Fats. Then Transfatty Acids. For a small period of time there was a niche rebellion against all things carbs, and now it looks like we're coming back against refined sugars (or all things refined white)

After reading a bit of anti-carb propaganda (Taubes) and being drawn into the "Wow, there are really bad things that you can eat" worldview - I decided to educate myself, and wget downloaded about 16,000 journal articles from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (They let you do this for $25, with the only request being that you put a 3 second delay between requests. Some awk/sed skills required to parse out the URLs, but not much. Totally download time was 39 hours)

After reading through 40 or 50 of those articles on topics like "metabolism", "glycolysis", "diabetes", (btw - can anyone recommend a good PDF index tool - Lucene is really not easy to plug/play install - I ended up using recursive grep -il on the pdftotext versions to track down docs (very 1993) - but surely someone has solved the problem of indexing 16,000 PDFs in a directory - google fu did not yield much, surprisingly) - I realized that I needed to pick up more education.

Two books I'm making my way through:

  o Essential Cell Biology, Second Edition - $7+shipping.[1]
  o Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, Fourth Edition - $14+Shipping. [2]
 

Plus, the one I really, really want - but used 2004 editions are insanely expensive, and there has been a lot of useful developments in nutrition and metabolism since 1999

  o Advanced Nutrition and Human Metabolism [3]

Thank goodness for a generous "Amazon.com Look Inside" allowance - I've probably spent about 10+ Hours perusing this book.

My takeaway, after admittedly putting only three or four months into this topic, is the following:

  o Very little has been donein the way of double-blinded,
    placebo controlled, rigorous nutrition studies.

  o The few that _have_ done these studies, have usually 
    come in with an agenda (Low Fat, Low Cholesterol, Low
    Carb).

  o For how important this whole field is, it's amazing 
    that we've invested so little.

So yes - most cereal (the exception potentially being anything your Paleo ancestors would have recognized as cereal) is probably bad for you. I'll go farther than the OP and say you're probably kidding yourself if you think that "Corn Flakes" or "Crispy Crunch" is significantly better than "Fruit Loops" - it might be marginally better, but none of the refined stuff is doing great things for the western metabolism.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/081533480X

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0716743396

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Nutrition-Metabolism-Sareen-G...