by Isaac Asimov

If you watch TV, you watch commercials.  There are those that are endlessly repeated; there are those that blast you with rock and roll; and there are those that insult your intelligence.  (Of course, one must assume that TV viewers have intelligence.)

There is the antacid pill that stresses the fact that it contains healthful calcium, and the happy user therefore declares it to be a "plus".  Presumably it will ward off the dread tragedy of "bad posture" (the term often used for osteoporosis).

Well, how many antacid pills do you plan to take?  If you're in ordinary health and eat and live reasonably, you may take an antacid pill once a month or so.  How much calcium will that give you?  Of course, if you pop such pills in order to get all that calcium, you will upset your acid-base balance and have serious problems.   Or, if you just happen to live under pressure and eat rapidly and foolishly so that you have chronic indigestion and must pop antacid pills, the chances are you won't live long enough to have osteoporosis, anyway.

Then, too, what about the breakfast food that tells you it supplies 100 percent of all the vitamins you need, so that if you eat any other breakfast food, you will have to eat four to 12 helpings of it?  (The poor breakfast-eaters blanch at this.)  But who on earth says you have to get all you vitamins in one meal?  What about spreading them through the three meals?  And in these days when vitamin pills cost less than jelly beans, why need anyone turn faint at the thought of not getting the full supply in one bite of cereal?

Or how about those cereals that tell you that there is no added sugar.  That may very well be so, but then just to show you how delicious and tasty that sugarless breakfast cereal is, they show you a bowlful drowned in strawberries and cream. (Anything tastes good with strawberries and cream - and the strawberries, of course, are loaded with sugar.)