I am subscribed to a relatively new magazine called Clean Eating, published quarterly by the publishers of Oxygen Magazine. I love a lot of the recipes, and they provide 30-day menus, shopping lists and gorgeous shots of the finished dishes (which makes my eyeballs happy). The product reviews and highlights are pretty helpful. The interviews with real women who have achieved their fitness goals are always motivational. While I do get a lot of healthier recipes from magazines like Cooking Light and Eating Well, Clean Eating comes at you from the fitness angle, and I appreciate that. Sadly, just like every other fitness magazine, it’s packed with ads for this supplement or that product, all of them claiming to be the next “must-have” product.

In the last two issues, an ad for a particular product caught my eye, and I was curious enough to pick it up and try it. It’s Dymatize’s Elite High Protein Cereal. It’s touted as a convenient fitness meal replacement. Packed with 25g of protein, just add water! Heck it even comes with its own spoon! I’ve tried their high-protein oatmeal product, and that was beyond disappointing – just plain gross! Regardless, I decided to give this a try. And here we go…

I picked up the Fiber Crunch flavor because I eat Fiber One cereal, and it looked like it could be similar. There are several flavors. At the Vitamin Shoppe where I bought this, I also saw Apple Loops (look like Fruit Loops) and O’s (looks like Cheerios). This single-serve container cost $1.99.

The nutrition panel doesn’t look too bad, 210 calories, 1.5 grams of fat, 37 grams of carbs, 13 whopping grams of fiber, 8 grams of sugar, and 25g of protein. The ingredients, eeehhh: wheat bran, sugar, high fructose corn syrup and malt flavoring, and it’s vitamin-fortified. In addition, it’s got whey protein isolate, nonfat dry milk and sucralose. Already reading that list, I’m skeptical. But I open it.

Tear off the foil top and you find what looks like Fiber One and whey protein powder. There’s also a “nifty” folding plastic spoon. Great idea, especially for people on the go – at least in theory.

The folding spoon, not very sturdy. I can see this being a pain in the ass, so I opt to use a real spoon.

The instructions say, Add 5-6 ounces of cold water, stir and enjoy! OK!

Uh… These are the contents with only 5 ounces of water. I can’t imagine that one more ounce would make it look BETTER. Worse, maybe.

Well? Looks like Fiber One, drowned in vanilla whey protein powder. Tastes like crap. Well, really, ok, besides tasting like crap, it tastes more like bran flakes, and really foul vanilla whey protein.

Verdict: The short-and-sweet of it is “don’t bother.” At least with this flavor. Maybe one of the other more “fun” flavors, instead of fiber, might be better. Still, it isn’t the cereal itself that made it so horrible as much as it was the whey protein and dry milk. It’s just awful. However, if you are traveling or live on-the-go, and want some convenient, high-protein meal replacements, I guess this could be an occasional stand-in. There are a slew of other convenient meal replacement products out there though - bars, shakes… and of course, real food like fruit, string cheese, hard boiled eggs. I just can’t see this ever fitting into my life. The convenience just isn’t worth the price or taste for me.

Last Modified : July 29th, 2008 Filed under : Eat Navigate : Previous post / Next post