20 "Healthy" Cereals Ranked by Fiber Per Dollar — and Sugar Per Bowl

Two numbers make this ranking work, and neither comes from a store shelf. The price side comes from the USDA Economic Research Service, which publishes national average prices built from retail scanner data and expressed as dollars per 100 edible grams. Filtered to ready-to-eat cereal, that file holds 100 food codes, 87 of them priced directly from scanner sales rather than estimated from a similar product. We used only those 87, because the other thirteen are imputed and would produce ties that aren't real.

Here is the honest limitation, stated up front rather than buried: the most recent version of that price file covers 2017 and 2018, and no newer one has been released. To bring it forward we applied the Bureau of Labor Statistics' breakfast-cereal price index, which averaged 222.70 across 2017 and 2018 and stood at 283.31 in August 2026 — a factor of 1.2722, or 27.2 percent. That carries the whole category forward evenly. What it cannot do is capture how individual brands moved relative to each other since 2018, through shrinkflation, private-label pressure or corporate reshuffling. These are relativities, not the price at your store this week, and the ranking should be read that way.

The bowl is the other half. We wanted a portion that reflects real life, so we went to the dietary recalls in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, where people report what they ate the previous day. Across 1,383 cereal-eating occasions in the 2021–2023 cycle, the weighted average pour was 50.7 grams. The median was 40. A quarter of people poured 27.5 grams or less, and a quarter poured 60 or more. Fifty grams sits almost exactly on the average, so that is the bowl every cereal here is measured in.

It is worth understanding why the declared servings differ so wildly in the first place, because it isn't arbitrary. Federal rules set the reference amount by density: cereals lighter than 20 grams per cup use a 15-gram reference, those between 20 and 43 grams per cup use 40 grams, and dense or biscuit-style cereals use 60. There's also a special provision for cereals carrying 28 grams or more of fiber per 100 grams, which lets them declare the smaller 40-gram amount no matter how heavy they are — which is why the two bran cereals near the top of this ranking print such modest servings.

Those brackets are the current ones. They were raised by a 2016 Food and Drug Administration rule that moved the middle bracket from 30 grams to 40 and the dense bracket from 55 to 60, with compliance deadlines in 2018 and 2019 that have long since passed. Every box on the shelf today uses the raised numbers.

Nutrition comes from the manufacturers' own label data as filed with USDA's FoodData Central, using the April 2026 release. Every one of the twenty rows was pinned by hand to a specific record, and the record IDs are published in the summary table at the end so you can check our arithmetic. One last caution before the countdown: label values are rounded, so differences smaller than about a gram of fiber per bowl are inside the noise. Where two cereals sit that close together, treat them as a tie.

The diet cereal that finishes dead last

There is no gentle way to open this. Special K — the box that taught a generation to think of cereal as a weight-management tool, the one with the red swimsuit and the two-week challenge — delivers 1.3 grams of fiber in a 50-gram bowl. That bowl costs about 51 cents, which puts it near the top of the price range here. Together those make 2.5 grams of fiber per dollar, the worst figure in this ranking by a wide margin, and roughly one-sixteenth of what the winner delivers.

The reason is simple once you look past the branding: Special K Original is a toasted rice flake. Rice is not a fiber-rich grain, and the label reflects that at 2.6 grams per 100 grams — less than a quarter of the next-lowest cereal on this list. There is a sugar figure too, 6.4 grams per bowl, and while that is genuinely modest in absolute terms, the ratio tells the real story: nearly five grams of sugar for every gram of fiber, the highest ratio of the twenty.

What Special K does carry is protein, 9 grams per bowl, the most in this set. That is a real number and worth knowing. But it is not what the box has spent fifty years selling, and it is not fiber.

If you want to see how fiber density varies across everyday foods rather than just cereals, we ranked fifty foods by fiber per calorie in a companion piece.

A name that promises grain, a panel that delivers sugar

"Great Grains" is about as direct as a health cue gets, and the cranberry-and-almond framing does the rest. The panel is less enthusiastic. A 50-gram bowl brings 3.6 grams of fiber alongside 10.7 grams of total sugar, essentially all of it added, at a cost of about 53 cents. That works out to 6.7 grams of fiber per dollar.

There is a wrinkle here worth mentioning, because it shows how quickly these products move. The USDA's own 2017–2018 composite for this cereal recorded 11.1 grams of fiber per 100 grams. The current manufacturer label reads 7.1. Whether that reflects a reformulation, a recipe change in the almond-and-cranberry mix, or a different measurement basis, the fiber content of this box appears to have fallen by roughly a third since the price data was collected — one of the larger gaps between the two vintages anywhere in this set.

Almonds and dried cranberries are real ingredients doing real work on texture and taste. They are simply not, at these quantities, doing much for the fiber column.

Three extra grains, less fiber than the original

Here is the first of two results that ought to bother anyone who has traded up within a brand. Multigrain Cheerios sounds like a straightforward improvement on plain Cheerios — more grains, surely more of everything good. In a 50-gram bowl it delivers 3.9 grams of fiber and 10.3 grams of sugar for about 54 cents. Plain Cheerios, which finishes ten places higher, delivers 5.2 grams of fiber and 2.6 grams of sugar for about 48 cents.

So the multigrain version brings roughly a quarter less fiber, four times the sugar, and costs about six cents more per bowl. Every axis moves the wrong way at once. The word "multigrain" is not regulated the way "whole grain" is, and in practice it describes the variety of grains in the box rather than how much of each grain survived processing intact.

None of which makes it a bad cereal to eat. It makes it a strange cereal to pay extra for, if fiber is the reason you reached for it.

The extension that adds sugar and nothing else

This one is the sharpest example in the ranking. Cheerios Protein delivers 3.7 grams of fiber and 15.5 grams of sugar in a bowl costing about 51 cents. Plain Cheerios delivers 5.2 grams of fiber and 2.6 grams of sugar for about 48 cents. Less fiber, six times the sugar, higher price.

And the protein? A 50-gram bowl of Cheerios Protein carries 6.4 grams. A 50-gram bowl of plain Cheerios carries 6.4 grams. They are, within the precision of a Nutrition Facts panel, identical. The protein advantage is visible on the box only because the declared serving is larger — 55 grams against 39 — which is exactly the mechanism this whole ranking was built to see through.

The pattern is worth filing away, because it turns up across the grocery store wherever a nutrient gets promoted to the front of a package. We've catalogued more of it in our guide to the claims food brands put on their labels.

The most expensive bowl in the ranking

Wheaties has been on breakfast tables and the backs of athletes for a century, and it is a genuinely whole-grain flake: 11.1 grams of fiber per 100 grams puts it in respectable company here. The problem is the price. At about 60.5 cents, a 50-gram bowl of Wheaties is the most expensive of all twenty cereals in this ranking, which drags a decent 5.6 grams of fiber down to 9.2 grams per dollar.

Sugar is modest at 7.4 grams per bowl, and the sugar-to-fiber ratio of 1.3 is among the better ones here. Sodium runs higher than most, at 704 milligrams per 100 grams, which is a fair bit of salt for something that tastes as plain as it does.

The declared serving is 27 grams — the smallest on this entire list, barely half of what the average person pours. If you have ever looked at the Wheaties panel and thought the numbers seemed gentle, that is why.

Clusters cost you, in sugar and in cents

Oatmeal, almonds, crisp. The cues all point the same direction, and the underlying flake is decent — 10 grams of fiber per 100 grams. But a 50-gram bowl runs about 52 cents and brings 11.7 grams of sugar, nearly 11 of which is added, for 5 grams of fiber. That lands at 9.6 grams of fiber per dollar.

Clusters are the recurring culprit in the lower half of this ranking. Getting oats and almonds to hold together in a crunchy nugget takes syrup, and the syrup shows up in the sugar column and in the calorie count, which at 192 per bowl is toward the high end here.

It is a pleasant, substantial cereal. It is priced and sweetened like a granola, and it performs like one.

Honest about the sugar, at least

Give this one credit for not hiding: "Brown Sugar" is right there in the name. A 50-gram bowl carries 8 grams of sugar and 4.5 grams of fiber, and at about 46 cents it is one of the cheaper bowls in the set, which lifts it to 9.7 grams of fiber per dollar despite an unremarkable fiber density.

The oat base is doing real work — 8.9 grams of fiber per 100 grams is solid for a sweetened squares cereal, and the 10.7 grams of protein per 100 grams is among the better figures outside the bran cereals. The sugar-to-fiber ratio of 1.8 sits right in the middle of the pack.

What keeps it in the lower half is arithmetic rather than any flaw: it costs about what the bran cereals cost and delivers about half their fiber.

The sweetest bowl on the list

Raisin Bran Crunch is the same idea as Raisin Bran with clusters added, and the clusters change the product more than the name suggests. A 50-gram bowl delivers 3.7 grams of fiber and 17.3 grams of total sugar — the highest sugar figure of any cereal in this ranking — with 11.8 grams of that added. The bowl costs about 38 cents, which gets it to 9.7 grams of fiber per dollar.

Compare that to plain Kellogg's Raisin Bran, eight places higher: 6 grams of fiber, 14.4 grams of sugar, about 33 cents. The Crunch version carries roughly 40 percent less fiber, three more grams of sugar, and costs about four cents more per bowl. The sugar-to-fiber ratio climbs from 2.4 to 4.7.

That ratio, 4.7 grams of sugar for every gram of fiber, is second-highest here — beaten only by Special K, which barely has fiber to make a ratio out of. If you want a broader tour of where sugar hides in ordinary groceries, we've mapped nine of the most common sources.

The biggest declared serving in the set

Raisin Nut Bran declares 65 grams as a serving — the largest on this list, and 30 percent more than the average person actually pours. That matters, because the panel numbers you read on the box are describing a bowl most people never make.

Measured at the same 50 grams as everything else, it brings 5.4 grams of fiber and 14.6 grams of sugar for about 52 cents, landing at 10.4 grams of fiber per dollar. The bran base is genuinely fibrous at 10.8 grams per 100 grams, but the raisins and the sugared almond clusters push total sugar to 29.2 grams per 100 grams, and the almonds push the price up alongside them.

It is a good illustration of the whole problem with per-serving comparisons. On the box, Raisin Nut Bran looks like it delivers 7 grams of fiber, which sounds excellent. In the bowl you actually pour, it delivers 5.4.

Gentle numbers, premium price

Kashi's Heart to Heart is a well-made cereal by the measures used here: 12.1 grams of fiber per 100 grams, a restrained 15.2 grams of total sugar per 100 grams, and a sugar-to-fiber ratio of 1.25 that puts it in the top third of this list. A 50-gram bowl gives you 6.1 grams of fiber and 7.6 grams of sugar.

What holds it back is the price. At about 57.6 cents a bowl it is the second most expensive cereal here, and that turns a good fiber figure into 10.5 grams of fiber per dollar — mid-table. The declared serving of 33 grams is also on the small side, about two-thirds of a real pour.

This is the shape of most premium natural-brand cereals in the data: the nutrition holds up, the value does not. You pay a real premium for the restraint.

The cleanest sugar-to-fiber ratio of all twenty

Plain Cheerios is the quiet outperformer of this list. A 50-gram bowl delivers 5.2 grams of fiber and just 2.6 grams of total sugar, of which only 1.3 grams is added. That ratio — half a gram of sugar for every gram of fiber — is the best of all twenty cereals here, and nothing else is close except All-Bran Original.

At about 48 cents a bowl it lands at 10.7 grams of fiber per dollar, tenth overall. That is a middling value score, and it is middling for a reason worth naming: Cheerios is not cheap. It sits in the upper half of the price range, and its fiber density of 10.3 grams per 100 grams is good but not exceptional. Where it wins outright is on what it doesn't do to the sugar column.

It is also the benchmark for the two line extensions that finished seventeenth and eighteenth, both of which cost more and deliver less. We put Cheerios up against a wider breakfast field in our comparison of thirty popular breakfast foods on protein, fiber and calories.

An oat-bran name and a dessert's calorie count

Cracklin' Oat Bran puts "oat bran" in its name, and the fiber is genuinely there: 12.5 grams per 100 grams, better than two-thirds of this list. A 50-gram bowl gives you 6.3 grams of fiber at about 56.6 cents, which comes to 11.1 grams of fiber per dollar.

The rest of the panel is where it gets interesting. That same bowl carries 14.3 grams of total sugar, 13.4 of it added, and 206 calories — the highest calorie count of any cereal in this ranking, and about 84 percent more than the bowl that finished first. The oil that makes the rings crisp and the syrup that makes them cling are both doing their part.

The bowl price is the third highest here too, behind Wheaties and Kashi Heart to Heart. A bran name, it turns out, tells you what grain is in the box and almost nothing about what else came along with it.

Two ingredients doing an unusual amount of work

Cinnamon Harvest is a shredded-wheat biscuit with a cinnamon coating, and the simplicity shows up in the numbers. A 50-gram bowl carries 5.8 grams of fiber, 7.4 grams of sugar, 164 calories and — this is the unusual part — zero milligrams of sodium. It is one of only two cereals on this list with no sodium at all.

At about 48 cents, that gives 11.9 grams of fiber per dollar, eighth overall. The sugar-to-fiber ratio of 1.3 is comfortably in the better half, and the protein at 11.5 grams per 100 grams is strong for a wheat biscuit.

The declared serving is 61 grams, or 31 biscuits, which is one of the more generous panels here. When a box declares a serving larger than people actually pour, its printed numbers overstate what lands in a typical bowl — the reverse of the Wheaties situation, and just as worth knowing.

Frosting included, and it still finishes seventh

Mini-Wheats has an obvious mark against it: the frosting is 10 grams of added sugar per 50-gram bowl, and every gram of the cereal's total sugar is added sugar. Yet it lands seventh, because the whole-wheat biscuit underneath is doing serious work and the price is low. Five grams of fiber in a bowl costing about 37 cents works out to 13.6 grams of fiber per dollar.

Sodium is the surprise here, at 17 milligrams per 100 grams — under 9 milligrams in a full bowl, essentially nothing, and the third-lowest here, behind only the two cereals that carry none at all. For a cereal that reads as candy-adjacent, the only thing it is actually loaded with is sugar.

This entry is also where the data got genuinely tricky. FoodData Central holds five current Kellogg records for Mini-Wheats Original at the same 60-gram, 25-biscuit serving, and one of them reports 15 grams of fiber per 100 grams while the other four report 10. Only the 10 reconciles with the 6 grams of fiber the box declares per serving, so that is what we used. Taking the first record a search returned would have moved this cereal up four places on a number that isn't real.

A different cereal from the All-Bran you're picturing

"Complete" shares a name with All-Bran Original but is a different product: a wheat bran flake rather than the dense bran extrusion. It carries 17.2 grams of fiber per 100 grams, which gives 8.6 grams in a 50-gram bowl — third-highest on this list — alongside 8.6 grams of sugar, for a sugar-to-fiber ratio of exactly 1.

Price is what keeps it at sixth rather than higher. At about 54 cents a bowl, it comes to 16 grams of fiber per dollar, roughly half what All-Bran Original manages.

One number stands out and is worth flagging plainly: sodium runs 724 milligrams per 100 grams, the highest of any cereal here, or about 362 milligrams in a 50-gram bowl. Bran flakes need salt to taste like anything, and this one uses more of it than its neighbors.

Two scoops, and a lot of sugar with them

Kellogg's Raisin Bran is one of the best fiber buys in the aisle and one of the sweeter bowls on this list, both at once, which is precisely why this ranking prints two columns instead of one. A 50-gram bowl brings 6 grams of fiber for about 33 cents — the second-cheapest bowl here — landing at 17.9 grams of fiber per dollar. It also brings 14.4 grams of total sugar, about half of it added and the rest from the raisins.

The sugar-to-fiber ratio of 2.4 puts it in the bottom half on that measure. Whether that trade reads as reasonable depends entirely on what you're weighing, and the point of laying both numbers side by side is that you get to decide rather than have the front of the box decide for you.

Its declared serving of 59 grams — one cup — sits comfortably above the average pour, which means the panel on the box is describing a fairly generous breakfast.

Nothing added, and it still beats sixteen cereals

Shredded Wheat is the plainest box in this ranking and among the best values in it. A 50-gram bowl delivers 6.7 grams of fiber for about 36 cents, which is 18.5 grams of fiber per dollar and fourth place overall. The sugar column reads 0. The added sugar column reads 0. The sodium column reads 0.

There is no other cereal on this list with that panel. One of the twenty matches it on sugar — the winner — but not on sodium, and nothing else comes close on both.

It is the strongest evidence in this whole exercise for a slightly deflating idea: the cereals that market themselves hardest on nutrition are not reliably the ones that deliver it per dollar, and the box with no marketing at all is sitting in the top four. We found the same pattern across whole store formats when we looked at which grocery stores offer the best nutrition per dollar.

The same shelf, the same idea, measurably better value

Post Raisin Bran and Kellogg's Raisin Bran sit next to each other, look nearly identical, and are not. At a 50-gram bowl, Post delivers 7 grams of fiber for about 31 cents. Kellogg's delivers 6 grams for about 33 cents. That is roughly 17 percent more fiber for roughly 7 percent less money, and it adds up to 22.7 grams of fiber per dollar against 17.9.

This gap is invisible on the shelf, and not because anyone is hiding it. The two boxes declare different servings — 57 grams for Post, 59 for Kellogg's — so the printed panels aren't directly comparable, and the difference is small enough that nobody would catch it by eye anyway.

The sugar picture is close to a wash: 14.9 grams per bowl for Post against 14.4 for Kellogg's, with Post carrying slightly more added sugar. Post's 31-cent bowl is the cheapest of all twenty cereals in this ranking, which is most of why it finishes third.

Enormous fiber, and a sugar figure the box doesn't lead with

All-Bran Original carries 29.3 grams of fiber per 100 grams, second only to the winner, and a 50-gram bowl delivers 14.7 grams of it for about 50 cents. That is 29.3 grams of fiber per dollar — nearly twelve times what Special K manages, out of the same aisle, at roughly the same price per bowl.

The sugar is the part that deserves saying out loud, because the packaging does not lead with it. That same bowl carries 11 grams of total sugar, 9.8 of it added. All-Bran is a sweetened cereal. It is also a spectacular fiber buy, and the sugar-to-fiber ratio of 0.75 is the second-best on this list precisely because there is so much fiber to divide into. Both things are true, and a single-column ranking would have shown you only one of them.

The 41-gram declared serving is smaller than a real pour, and there is a specific regulatory reason for it: cereals carrying 28 grams or more of fiber per 100 grams get to use the 40-gram reference amount regardless of how dense they are. All-Bran qualifies comfortably, so its panel describes about four-fifths of a typical bowl.

Forty grams of fiber per dollar, and no sugar at all

Fiber One Original Bran wins this ranking, and the margin is not close. A 50-gram bowl delivers 22.5 grams of fiber — half again as much as second place, and more than four times the middle of the field — for about 56 cents. That is 40.2 grams of fiber per dollar.

Then there is the other column, which is the part that makes this a clean win rather than a trade-off. Total sugar in that bowl: zero. Added sugar: zero. It is the only cereal on this list that tops the fiber ranking and the sugar ranking simultaneously, which is why there is no asterisk to put next to it. At 112 calories, it is also the lightest bowl of the twenty, roughly half of what Cracklin' Oat Bran brings.

What you are actually buying is bran extrusion at 45 grams of fiber per 100 grams, and it tastes exactly like that sounds — this is not a cereal anyone describes as a treat, and its 40-gram declared serving reflects the same high-fiber provision that All-Bran uses. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic. On the two things this ranking measures, nothing else in twenty health-marketed boxes comes near it.

For the wider context of where cereal sits among everything else on a grocery list, we track how much fiber people actually get from a typical diet.

Three patterns survived the full twenty, and the first is the least comfortable. The health cue on the front of the box is close to useless as a value signal. "Multigrain," "protein," "great grains" and "special" all finished in the bottom half. The two boxes that finished first and fourth market themselves on bran and on nothing at all.

The second pattern is that line extensions consistently lose to their originals. Cheerios Protein and Multigrain Cheerios both deliver less fiber, more sugar and a higher price per bowl than plain Cheerios. Raisin Bran Crunch delivers 40 percent less fiber and three more grams of sugar than plain Raisin Bran, for more money. In every case the extension is sold as the upgraded version, and in every case the upgrade is going somewhere other than the two columns here — into texture, into clusters, into a nutrient claim the original already met.

The third is that the declared serving is where the confusion is manufactured, without anyone breaking a rule. Wheaties declares 27 grams and Raisin Nut Bran declares 65 — the same breakfast on paper, two and a half times apart in the bowl. Both declarations are correct under the density brackets in federal labeling rules, which also round every figure on the panel, meaning small differences between adjacent cereals here should be treated as ties rather than rankings.

Sugar per gram of fiber is the compact way to hold all of this in your head. Cheerios Original sits at 0.5 and All-Bran Original at 0.75. Special K sits at 4.9, Raisin Bran Crunch at 4.7 and Cheerios Protein at 4.2. That is close to a tenfold spread within a single aisle, and it does not track price, brand prestige or the language on the front of the box in any direction you could predict from the shelf.

Here is the full table. Prices are 2017/18 national scanner averages carried to August 2026 dollars, nutrition is from the April 2026 release of USDA's FoodData Central Branded Foods, and the last column gives the price food code and the nutrition record ID for every row so the whole thing is reproducible.

The same method applied to a different nutrient produces a similarly scrambled leaderboard, which we worked through in our ranking of twenty-five foods by protein per dollar.