What is a Grape Nut? "Carin Gendell, who was its senior brand manager in the 1980s, remembers how her staff described it. 'Grape Nuts,' she says, 'was people eating advertising.'" Grape Nuts are made out of lies!

Here's what Grape Nuts is, really: wheat, barley, yeast, water. Here's what Grape Nuts is not: everything they told you it was.

The founder of Postum Cereals not only cooked up Grape Nuts in Battle Creek, Mich., around 1898, but also concocted some of the earliest mass advertising to peddle it. A 1910 ad said Grape Nuts had "phosphate of potash" for building "brain and nerves." It didn't. Another said the Panama Canal couldn't have been dug without Grape Nuts because it "keeps almost indefinitely in any climate." Other ads claimed it prevented malaria and appendicitis. It doesn't.

Nor do Grape Nuts help make you A Real Man, nor do they make you gay! You've been tricked!

[WSJ. Pic via]