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Smile-breaks

One Healthy Breakfast Bar - 56 Ingredients! No Wonder We’re All Getting So Fat

     You know those free samples they put in the plastic bag that protects your Sunday paper? They’re mostly oatmeal cereal, but sometimes it’s something you can use.

     This morning I picked up the paper and tossed it into the back seat of the car as we drove off to church.

     Ka-plunk! The plastic wrapper with the free sample bag at the end slipped off the paper and landed on the driveway with a thud. I leaned out and retrieved it. Threw it in the back and forgot it.

     Later that day I checked it out. Inside the plastic bag was a small fluorescent orange package. “Oatmeal to Go,” it said. I knew it. More oatmeal.

     Wait! It says here, “Breakfast Bar.” I kind’a like a breakfast bar now and then. And over here it says “Brown Sugar Cinnamon.”

     That did it. I love cinnamon and I love sugar – white, brown, purple – doesn’t matter. But first - the calorie count.

     Oops! Two hundred and twenty. A lot of calories for a little two-inch breakfast bar. Oh well, with all those calories, you must get a lot of nutrition, you think? I found the “Nutrition Facts” on the back of the wrapper.

     Wow! I was impressed. Lots of Vitamin A and B6 and E. A whole lot of calcium, iron, thiamin, riboflavin and niacin. And tons of folic acid and phosphorus. Does eating phosphorous make you glow?

     How’d they do that? Get all that nutrition in one little breakfast bar? Maybe there was some broccoli rolling around in the oats.

     To check it out, I went looking for the ingredients. I found them listed in tiny print on the back of the wrapper. They had to be in fine print because there were fifty-six of them!

     No wonder we’re all getting so fat! Fifty-six ingredients in one little breakfast bar! After the whole grain rolled oats and brown sugar, the other ingredients included sodium alginate, enzyme modified soy protein, natural mixed tocopherols, calcium phosphate and sodium hexametaphosphate and eight more lines of polysyllabic ingredients. No broccoli.

     Gee, used to be Mom grabbed some brown sugar, a cup of oatmeal, a couple cups of flour, a chunk of butter and an egg or two and tossed them in a bowl and stirred it all up.  Shaped them into bars and stuck them in the oven.

     The way I count, that’s about five ingredients. We didn’t get fat in those days. And the newspaper didn’t land with a thud in the driveway.

     Well, maybe it did. I don’t remember.

     The package said the “Oatmeal to Go” bar was moist and chewy. I was getting real hungry reading all those mouth-watering ingredients – but then I wasn’t so sure about putting all that nutrition into my system in one swallow. So I went off looking for someone to share this nutritional boost with.

     When I found him, I carefully broke the bite-sized “Oatmeal to Go” bar in half, making sure that one of the halves was way smaller than the other and making sure to give him the larger half.

     He had no idea what he was about to eat, other than that it was an oatmeal breakfast bar and it was free. He downed his half in one bite. I watched carefully. From a distance.

     He seemed to be all right. No change in color.

     “Not bad,” he said.

     Encouraged, I took a tiny bite.

     It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t moist. It wasn’t chewy. But boy! am I feeling ready to conquer the world with all that Vitamin A and E and B6 and phosphorous calcium tocopherol metamaxacalcite or whatever it is in my bones!  And the scale will never tell what those fifty-six ingredients did to my waistline… unless you heard the thud.

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