Thursday, 21 July 2016

Weetabix PROTEIN: A novel material for milk absorption

It's been a while and I'm starving and in need of some protein to supplement my daily workout routine. To this end I thought Weetabix PROTEIN would have been the ideal breakfast. Oh was I wrong.











Let's begin this review article on Weetabix's newest innovation.
On the face of it, Weetabix is a great breakfast idea; a biscuit snack (I can't give it the label of cereal despite being wholegrain, in the same way you don't call a Jaffa cake a biscuit) low in fat, high in carbs, protein and fibres to get you through the day. In reality you're better off eating porridge as that's basically what you get.
This is clear by just looking at the - as yet unscientifically recognised - Milk Absorption Ratio (MAR), a whopping 0.92. Higher than any cereal to date!

I'd like to draw your attention to a novel material of scientific interest

Vantablack is a carbon nanotube based coating that absorbs >99.9% of the light incident upon it in the visible spectrum. This means that hardly any light is reflected and Vantablack is dubbed the darkest material ever. This material is so black your eyes cannot resolve detail on its surface, it could be perfectly flat or roughened you couldn't tell visually. Why do I use Vantablack as a comparison? Because I'm making the exaggerating claim that Weetabix is to milk what Vantablack is to light.

Is such a massively high MAR a bad thing?
Well this is all down to personal opinion. I would argue yes, any MAR >0.5 can have severe negative effects on the texture, crunch and therein quality of the cereal experience. Part of eating a breakfast cereal is the enjoyable sounds of crunching and crisping as you chomp down spoonful after spoonful of breakfast bliss. Simply put, Weetabix PROTEIN does not provide this essential part of breakfast time for me, after mere seconds of the milk interacting with the two ‘biscuits’ I was left with a metastable biscuit-looking mulch that, upon digging in with my spoon, turned to mush in the pitiful remainder of milk forming a sad looking soup.

In addition, I must talk about the taste. I wasn't blown away with the flavouring of my mush, I had thought the addition of a banana or strawberry would help, but if you have to proactively add external flavourings to the cereal then why not just buy Weetabix Banana.

Overall I was quite disappointed with the whole experience, so much so that I didn't even consider it worth testing for the proteins they claim to be in the cereal, for that reason I give this relatively expensive and unenjoyable cereal a

2/10

Try again Weetabix!