Product contains ‘real’ food

I get a kick out of advertisements that claim their product contains ‘real’ food … When a processed, packaged product boasts that one of its ingredients is ‘real’, you have to wonder what else the product contains.

I decided to investigate a breakfast cereal that brags about containing ‘real’ strawberries, and sure enough the product contains freeze dried strawberries … ingredient number 23 of a whopping 38 ingredients.

Other interesting things about this ingredient list is that the word ‘sugar’ shows up 4 times, and on closer examination I discovered that there are an additional 4 types of sugars (honey, molasses, corn syrup and high fructose corn syrup) listed AND a chemical sugar (sucralose).

That’s 9 forms of sugar to go with those freeze-dried real strawberries!

Tomorrow morning I’m going to slice some really-real juicy ripe fresh strawberries onto my really-real bowl of brown rice and top it off with really-real almond milk.

Here is the complete ingredient list of the breakfast cereal I investigated. The numbers, indentations and colours are my additions.

1. Whole Grain Wheat 2. Wheat Bran 3. Sugar      Berry Flavored Oat Cluster Toasted Oats 4. Rolled Oats 5. Sugar                6. Soybean Oil 7. Honey                8. Molasses           9. Sugar 10. Rolled Oats Strawberry Flavored Apples 11. Dried Apples 12. Artificial Flavor 13. Citric Acid 14. Red #40 15. Sodium Sulfite 16. Corn Syrup           17. Brown Sugar 18. Natural 19. And Artificial Flavor 20. BHT [For Freshness] 21. Wheat Flour 22. High Fructose Corn Syrup 23. Freeze Dried Strawberries 24. Salt 25. Malt Flavoring 26. Natural And Artificial Flavors 27. Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C) 28. Sucralose 29. Niacinamide 30. Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (Vitamin B6) 31. Reduced Iron 32. Folic Acid 33. Riboflavin (Vitamin B2) 34. Vitamin A Palmitate 35. BHT (Preservative) 36. Thiamin Hydrochloride (Vitamin B1) 37. Vitamin D 38. Vitamin B12