What the heck is yoga bread?

Wandering the aisles of a New Jersey supermarket yesterday, I came across a new product -- "Yoga Bread" by a local bakery (The Baker of Milford, New Jersey). Being a long time practitioner of yoga, I was both intrigued and put off by the name.

These days, yoga is being used to sell just about any and everything -- from Chrysler Town & Country minivans to Chopard limited edition "om" jewelry. It's almost bad enough to push me off the mat and back into the gym.

It's too bad The Baker doesn't have the confidence to sell the bread without a marketing label. "Yoga Bread" is actually pretty good to taste and contains nutritious ingredients such as organic whole wheat and rye, dried unsweetened cranberries, sesame, sunflower, poppy and pumpkin seeds, sea salt, flax seeds and olive oil.

My personal view (more as a consumer than a media and marketing professional) is that The Baker has it wrong. The company would be far better off positioning the bread as nutritious and good tasting -- better for you than say, Pepperidge Farm Raisin Bread, -- while not sacrifing any of the pleasure of eating it.

To top it off, Yoga Bread is described in the context of "five yogic principles" -- proper exercise, proper breathing, proper relaxation, proper diet, positive thinking and meditation. To come up with this, The Baker took the easy route and simply ripped off the Sivananda Yoga website which lists these same five yoga "points." link .

While Sivananda is a respected organization, they have simplified the yoga principles for the American and Western markets. In truth, there are actually eight yoga principles or "limbs" -- not five -- according to the classic text of The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the ancient, foundational text from which all forms of Yoga are derived. To learn more about the eight limbs of yoga, here is a quick read on the subject courtesy of Yoga Journal link .

If The Baker insists on using yoga as a marketing prop, then the company should at least credit sources -- and perhaps even make the marketing message accurate!