frosted mini-wheats

after corporate morning revival, a herd of brothers rushed the cereal shelf in the front house kitchen. there were many choices: honey bunches, cherrios, cinnamon toast crunch, and frosted mini-wheats. upon a quick look at the box, one brother noticed that the following advertising gimmick was printed across the top of the box: "clinically proven to increase attentiveness by nearly 20%"

the immediate consensus among the attending brothers was that frosted-miniwheats was the way to go. after diving halfway through my first bowl of cereal, i saw a tiny "1" etched at the end of the advertising statement, so cleverly concealed to the left of a cartoon mini-wheat figure that graced the cover of our cereal box, so that the "1" was barely visible unless the box was under close inspection.

must be a footnote, so i frantically searched the rest of the box for the explanation of the footnote. during this time, we had a good time joking that the increase in attentiveness was probably compared to students who ate no breakfast.

i stumbled across the footnote. It read: "Children who ate one serving of frosted mini-wheats demonstrated an 18% increase in attentiveness 3 hours after those children that didn't eat breakfast."

well, that's great. the control group was a group of kids that didn't even eat breakfast. something tells me that the increase in attentiveness is no longer so unexpected.

advertising: 1. front house: 0.