Mmmm, that sucralose flavor

When I was a kid my favorite breakfast was oatmeal. Quaker Oats, apple cinnamon flavor. I would watch with wonder as my mom would slowly pour hot water into the dry powdery stuff, stir it a bit and magically turn it into the squishy mushy stuff I couldn't get enough of. Now that I'm older a lot has changed. No one does anything for me. My shoes are bigger. My knees make clicking noises when I bend my legs and hardly anyone every pinches my cheeks and says how cute I am. But I still like oatmeal. At least I thought I did.
So I bought some in the store. But, seeing as another adult change has left me looking at the prices of things and doing disconcerting math in my head, I realized Quaker Oats was three times the price of another, similar looking box of oatmeal of the same flavor. So I got that one. It's called Food Club Instant Oatmeal and claims to have been around since 1945. It also claims to have 50 percent less sugar than "regular apples and cinnamon instant oatmeal." That should have been a clue.
So I had some this morning. I was surprised at how, during its morph from powder to squishy mush it actually took on the appearance of having big chunks of stuff where before there were no chunks. They looked like pieces of apple. And that's what they tasted like, too. Sort of. They were chewier and way too sweet to be a normal apple. So I checked the ingredients list on the box.
I don't have a box of the stuff I used to eat, but seeing as how the rule in our house was sugar could not be listed in the top three on the ingredients list, I'm thinking sugar was one of the last things listed. And I imagine there were very few ingredients other than oats, cinnamon and some kind of apple flavor.
The Food Club ingredients list is in tiny print that stretches down the box for two inches. After rolled oats, there's dehydrated apples, which makes sense, except that they are "treated with sodium sulfite to promote color retention." Promote color retention? Then comes sugar, number three, which means it would never make it into our house, then salt, cinnamon, and here is where it gets weird. Calcium carbonate (isn't that the stuff they use for upset stomachs?), natural flavors (I can't imagine what those entail), citric acid, guar gum, yes guar gum, and here's the big one, sucralose, the chemically engineered sweetener sixty thousand times sweeter than sugar and the progenitor of unknown side effects to one's health, reduced iron, and pyridoxine hydrochloride. Of course. You really can't make oatmeal without pyridoxine hydrochloride. It gives it that home cooked flavor.
Actually, and not surprisingly, the stuff tasted awful, like a bowl of hot sugar with apple flavored gum drops in it.