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

I don’t eat all that well when I’m tired and cranky.

Actually, let me rephrase that … I don’t take the time to purchase and prepare low crap food when I am tired and cranky.

I learned this about myself when I recently returned from a ten day business trip. I got home after dinner time and my fridge was lacking in fresh stuff … which leaves my fridge pretty empty indeed.

So I went shopping at the big box grocer that is open late and I found myself wandering around the store being tempted by the prepackaged stuff that I teach people to stay away from.

Even though I knew the food would leave me with a tummy ache, my tired cranky mood kept saying “I don’t care what you feed me … just feed me …”

It wasn’t too hard to find relatively low crap convenient food to take home … the hard part was trying to find low crap convenient food that wasn’t heavily packaged.

I didn’t do a very good job staying away from the packaging.

I came home from the store with two bags of groceries. One was full of fresh fruit and veggies. The other contained a hot, cooked chicken, a loaf of sprouted grain bread, and a small tub of mayonnaise … all great fixings for a low crap chicken sandwich … all heavily packaged in plastic.