Our YMCA has recently changed to Precor equipment and updated the treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationery bikes. Each of them have a TV screen. Yesterday I really enjoyed my run while watching the Westminister Dog Show rerun. Today I did a 10 minute elliptical training warm up before doing my personal training strength session. I have tried the bikes, too.

On the old equipment you could watch the closed caption TVs, but they were in the background. Now they are right in your face and I have mixed feeling about them:

I shouldn't act like I don't watch TV at home, because I do. But I rarely sit and watch it. I'm cleaning house or exercising or Sparking while it is on. I rarely give it my full attention, and when my hubby is watching, he regularly records what he wants to see and then fast forwards through the commercials. So I haven't paid attention to commercials much recently until the new cardio equipment arrived at the gym.

Some of the commercials have me shaking my head. Two of the most flagrant were:

1. A Multi-grain Cheerios ad says that people who eat more whole grains weigh less, when their multi-grain cereal has a lot more sugar in it than the regular Cheerios. Regular Cheerios are 100 calories and 1 gram of sugar for a cup, if I remember right. Multigrain Cheerios are 3/4 of a cup for a serving and the same or more calories and several times the sugar.

2. Centrum vitamins advertise that their vitamins were used in a recently released study as if that is some big accomplishment. I remember reading here on SP that the study determined no benefit to taking the vitamins.

It makes me extra thankful that SparkPeople exists to give us unbiased information about products we use to improve our health and fitness. Thanks, SparkPeople!!