Bad Product: Liquid Cereal

This is the second entry in a row where it’s not so much the advertising or packaging that’s bad, its the product. But if marketing is supposed to begin with the product itself, then Liquid Cereal is my nomination for Mascot For All Bad Products. I want to take a case of this stuff over to the developers of the Worst Condo Sales Centre in the World.

The product name is pretty terrible, but the real bad advertising here kicks in with the ingredients list and nutritional information. It comes in four flavours, and the ingredients for the Peanut Butter flavour include:

Ingredients: fat free milk, water, cereal blend (yellow corn meal, whole oat flour, rice flour), sugar (sucrose), peanut butter (peanuts, dextrose, hydrogenated canola, cottonseed and/or soybean oils), natural and artificial flavors, artificial color, mono & diglycerides (contains refined soybean oil), tricalcium phosphate, stabilizer (locust bean gum), guar gum, maltodextrin, carrageenan), sucralose, ascorbic acid, vitamin A palmitate, and vitamin D3

Yet the nutritional information makes it sound like a healthy, responsible thing to suck in every morning:

Nutrition Facts: serving size: 11 fl oz; calories 170; total fat 2g; saturated fat 0g; trans fat 0g; cholesterol 5mg; sodium 110 mg; potassium 320mg; total carb 32g; dietary fiber 1g; sugars 21g; protein 7g; vitamin A 30%; vitamin C 30%; calcium 30%; iron 6%; vitamin D 30%; phosphorous 25%

This is where it becomes useful to remember that with nutrition, as with buying a car or choosing a school, or any other consumer choice we have to make in a given day, COMMON SENSE needs to come before everything else, including trust in what the label wants us to read.

I don’t know about you, but even though one of these cans contains 30% of my daily recommended calcium intake, my common sense is still telling me NOT TO DRINK HYDROGENATED COTTONSEED OIL FOR BREAKFAST.

- Thanks to Adrian for the tip.