Wheaties Fuel Mr. Tidbit doesn't recall whether there has ever been a serious spinoff of Wheaties. (He doesn't count 1994's tiny basketball-like Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls.) But there is one now: Wheaties Fuel, in a black box that carries many references to athletics, energy and performance. Both regular Wheaties and Wheaties Fuel are labeled "The Breakfast of Champions." But if nobody told you this new cereal is a kind of Wheaties, you probably wouldn't guess that it is.
For one (large) thing, Wheaties is whole-grain wheat, plus sugar, salt, corn syrup and a handful of nutritional and other additives. Wheaties Fuel is whole-grain wheat, crisp rice, sugar, whole-grain oats, corn bran, honey, canola oil, maltodextrin, wheat bran, corn starch, brown-sugar syrup, salt, cinnamon, barley-malt extract, corn-syrup solids, color added, guar gum, cellulose gum, soy lecithin, artificial flavor and a bunch of nutritional and other ingredients.
For another, Wheaties Fuel is much denser than Wheaties. A serving of Wheaties (3/4 cup, lots of which is air between the wheat flakes) weighs 27 grams. A serving of Wheaties Fuel (also 3/4 cup, but much more tightly packed) weighs 55 grams -- twice as much! There's about twice as much of lots of things in that 55-gram serving, including calories (210 vs. 100), carbohydrates (46 grams, including 14 grams of sugars, vs. 22, including 4 grams of sugars) and fiber (5 grams vs. 3). Oddly, both cereals contain 3 grams of protein. Similarly, if you ate 55 grams of regular Wheaties, you'd be getting about the same amounts of added nutrients as in Wheaties Fuel, with a few exceptions: regular Wheaties contains folic acid and has much more iron and zinc; Wheaties Fuel contains vitamin E and has more calcium.
Where Mr. Tidbit saw it, the 17.1-ounce (nine-serving) box of Wheaties Fuel sells for the same price as the 15.6-ounce (16 half as big servings) box of regular Wheaties. Ounce for ounce, Wheaties Fuel is a slightly better buy. Cup-for cup, it costs almost twice as much.
AL SICHERMAN