Category: Food

Do you have a favorite cereal? I don’t have cereal often but when I do it’s usually because I have a random weird craving to have it for dinner like my mom used to let me do occasionally; perhaps it’s a craving for that familiarity of a fond childhood memory. Either way, I know one thing about cereal: their nutrition facts are all over the place (maybe that’s just all processed and packaged American food? That’s for another blog post entirely). Anyways.

I Zeroed in on Fiber and Potassium

I found this dataset of 80 cereals, cleaned it up, and I took a look at it to see if there were any significant comparable numbers and trends. I looked at each aspect of the nutrition label including sugar, fiber, sodium, fat, calories, and vitamins, but what I found was that a strong positive correlation exists between fiber and potassium, indicating that cereals high in fiber are also likely to be high in potassium! I went further as to see which manufacturers cereals average the highest fiber and potassium content, and I found that it was Nabisco! Those are the people that make Oreo’s and Nilla Wafers (who knew they also made cereal? Not me). This was compared to Quaker Oats, Post, Kelloggs, and General Mills (I took out the American Home Food Products data).

The blue bars in my chart represent fiber content. I know my chart is sad (at best), but if you look closely (yikes), in the Nabisco section, you can actually see the blue bars compared to in the other manufacturer sections where it barely exists.

An Infographic?

I actually switched around what I was going to do at least four times. I had no idea how I was going to go about it and ultimately, a long vertical infographic popped into my head and it made sense to me. Now, I wrote the text first before editing the layout of the infographic and I fear it sounds very sales-y, commerciall-y, market-y, but that’s just what I’m used to! I tried, OKAY! I like to think of it as ~informative~. I figured there are a lot of people who don’t like to be told about what’s in the food they’re eating (trust me, I would know), and this is a playful, calm way to go about it. That’s another reason I just chose to identify and report on a trend rather than identify a trend and then use my media portion to be like, “Cereal has so much sugar! It’s gonna give you diabetes!” You know?

Canva A.K.A. my Bae

Canva is actually the love of my life and she executed my vision for this infographic perfectly. Included my chart, visuals of cereal bowls and other supporting icons, an icon with the correlation of the potassium and fiber link, and the Nabisco logo. I broke up the text into small, digestible chunks, getting straight to the point with each, but also making fun, engaging titles to grab attention (you have to be fun when the topic is cereal). I used Canva on my Chromebook!

Attribution

All of the icons are from within the Canva platform with the exception of the Nabisco logo which I got from a simple Google search and of course the chart I made on Microsoft Excel. Canva has so many cute icons. Don’t play with her! All of my nutrition based facts and tips are from the CDC.

In Another Life

In another life where I actually like looking at numbers and I desire to get better at making charts and stuff of the sort in Excel, I would have added a scatter plot highlighting the higher numbers in Nabisco cereals. I also would have made a chart where it just shows the average fiber and potassium content of each manufacturer instead of the content for multiple cereals, that way it’d be less cluttered. I think the use of small little bowl and spoon icons on a chart or scatter plot would be cute and simple too.

Now go, and eat thy cereal!

My favorite cereal! I had many different favorite cereals over the years: Raisin Bran, Krave, Fruity Pebbles. But in the end of my cereal eating era (there are only two I eat from time to time now), it was the Special K Chocolatey Delight that had me in a chokehold.

Have you walked into cereal aisles recently? There are like, a thousand options. That’s a lot of nutrition labels to read…

That’s why the data set I chose for this ‘Data Project’ is a cereal dataset!

My Cereal Data

Admittedly, this project was the bane of my existence and my headache the entire week. I don’t use Microsoft often, much less Excel, numbers are not my jam, and I simply didn’t (genuinely) have time to go to the DKC for help (which was part of my headache). I like making pretty things and looking at pretty things. Very different. I don’t like how my charts or tables look but I am so ready to stop looking at them. I digress, nothing is easy when you first do it, so a little struggle is healthy, but respectfully, I am so glad that this part is over:P

I got my cereal data from Kaggle btw!

Trend

So, I know we all had a moment in our upbringing when someone told us that cereal isn’t healthy and it was like this crazy realization so much so that we went into a rabbit hole of cereal nutrition labels (…no? Just me?), so instead of focusing on things like sugar and carbs which we all know cereals tend to have a quite a bit of, I wanted to see if there were any trends between any other parts of the nutrition labels. What I found (and chose to focus on) was that a strong positive correlation exists between fiber and potassium, indicating that cereals high in fiber are also likely to be high in potassium and cereals manufactured by Nabisco tend to have the highest average fiber content (therefore, they also have a higher average potassium content per serving)! Yay for no muscle cramps and regularity, if you know what I mean…

How?

How did I find this trend? Well, after I loaded the downloaded and loaded the data into Excel, I went through and deleted and columns and rows that I didn’t find relevant or didn’t want to analyze. I made a chart using the ‘Format as Chart’ button in Excel, and inserted a Pivot Table using that button. With the Pivot Table feature, you can make your own perfect storm of variables that you want to look at next to each other so that its easier to compare and well, analyze. I spent the most time doing this. I clicked around, adding and taking away different nutritional variables but always keeping the cereal name present. In the value field, I made sure I always had ‘average’ instead of ‘sum’ that way I was always looking at the averages of the numbers in front of me instead of what they added up to be. Everything I said is basically everything Professor Berge goes over in this video. Once I thought I saw a trend (the one I mentioned earlier), I asked ChatGPT how to calculate a correlation because I wanted to make sure I wasn’t just imagining it (lol) and these are the instructions it gave me:

1. Click on an empty cell where you want to display the correlation value.

2. Enter the formula: =CORREL(range_fiber, range_potass), replacing range_fiber and range_potass with the actual cell ranges for the fiber and potassium columns, respectively (e.g., =CORREL(B2:B101, C2:C101)).

3. Press Enter to calculate the correlation. The result will indicate the strength of the relationship between fiber and potassium. A value close to 1 indicates a strong positive correlation.

…To which the value was 0.90! I was not, in fact, imagining it.

That’s when I decided to move some more values around and see which manufacturers cereals tend to have the highest fiber and potassium contents and I landed with Nabisco. I didn’t make a chart for that, however (Remember? Bane of my existence?).

So, All-Bran with Extra Fiber does, in fact, beat the rest of cereals in fiber content. Period.

Thank you for coming to my…Blog talk?