Shopping Readings ( -- or the Curse of Reading, Part I)

I have a small problem (considering the type of problems out there, this is a little one for sure...) and the problem is that I am a compulsive reader. I will read anything that crosses my path: magazines, my spam email, your email, books, websites, small signs, billboards, literally ANYTHING.

I call it the "The Curse of Reading" and considering that some days ago Steve Jobs publicly "announced" that people do not read anymore (I personally believe that he simply doesn't know how to market to readers so he took the easy way out), reading may have become a real curse... because seriously, sometimes I feel I am the only one "seeing" some things.

Below you will find a good example. Roaming the supermarket, I came accross the sachet that you can see below and its text caught my attention. As you can read, it is for doing Smoothies.... but one minute, right below the title it says:

"Add a fresh banana, milk, and ice to make 1 quarter of refreshing smoothie".

Are you KIDDING me?

Now, I have been living in this country for just 4 years so my first thought was that there may be something about how to made smoothies that I didn't know. So I went online and made some research about the "basics" needed for a smoothie . It turns out that for a good smoothie, your indispensables are:

8 Fruit 8 Milk 8 Sugar 8 Ice

So, what is in there that costs between .75 and 1 dollar, that I need for a good smoothie? Just sugar? And if that is the case, why would I but it "disguised" this way?

I turned the pack around to read the ingredients and I found out that yes, basically, you are paying for all the bad stuff that a smoothie doesn't need to have, like corn syrup and artificial flavor... To be fair it has exactly sugar, corn syrup solids, nonfat dry milk, propylene glycol alginate, artificial flavor and modified soy protein.

Half of those components are not necessary, the other half are not healthy. And they add 50 more calories, 13 carbs and 11g of sugar to your smoothie.

Of course, I bought it. I needed to scan the product and show it here --so I could prove that this is for real not part of my imagination.

Now, can someone let me know why, WHY, WHY, would someone spend money in this product? How come they can add milk, ice and bananas to this, but they can't add more milk and sugar if needed? Why would you buy this? Isn't it like buying dehydrated water?

Now, you see, this is the curse of reading...

Can someone please help me, and explain this product to me?