I love yogurt. With it's live bacterial cultures, high calcium content, and protein to boot, it is often praised as a healthy, wholesome snack--especially for women, who have a higher RDA for calcium than men but too often fail to eat enough dairy or meat to reach nutritional requirements.
But have you ever looked at your yogurt label? I mean, really looked at it?? I was shocked to discover that my favorite brand contains 14 grams of sugar per serving. That's more than the sugary fruit and grain bars I'd long ago deemed too "candybar-like" to be a regular addition to my diet! Also, to my chagrin, the second ingredient on the label...? High fructose corn syrup. Why, Yoplait? Why???
I learned firsthand that not all yogurts are created equal. A quest to find what to do about it revealed the following article, from Health Action newsletter.
Yogurt: Health food... or dessert?
Plop a 1960s shopper down in the yogurt aisle of a 1990s supermarket and she’d probably drop her loaf of Wonder bread. Yogurt’s come a long way, baby.
On the upside, it’s got less fat than it did 30 years ago, when yogurt first showed up in supermarket dairy cases. On the downside, it’s looking a lot more like dessert than health food.
For children, you can now find yogurt with added candy, Jell-O, or Trix "fruity colors"—that is, the same artificial colors and flavors that make some kids think they’re getting fruit instead of sugar when they eat Trix (make that "Tricks") cereal. For adults, you can find flavors like chocolate eclair, coconut cream pie, and caramel praline.
If you’re looking for dessert, almost any yogurt is better than cakes, cookies, pies, and the rest. But if you’re looking for a healthy food, you’ve got to be choosy.
The Best
You can’t beat a cup of plain low-fat or fat-free yogurt. It can have as much as 400 mg of calcium—40 percent of the Daily Value (DV)—more than a glass of 1% or fat-free milk
(30 to 35 percent of the DV). And, like milk, it also has protein, B-12, riboflavin, potassium, magnesium, and zinc. The only exception: Yogurt has no vitamin D because, unlike milk, it’s not fortified.
What’s more, people who have trouble digesting lactose (the naturally occurring sugar in milk) should have no problem with yogurt. The "live and active cultures" digest the lactose for you.
Whether those Lactobacillus bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus—the bacteria in yogurt—have other benefits is unclear. But even if they don’t, yogurt’s still a bargain. All those nutrients for just over 100 calories is a steal.
That is, if you eat it plain. Not that it has to be eaten alone.
Yogurt’s natural tartness makes it a perfect foil for a sweet, ripe banana, juicy fresh (or frozen) berries, or even canned (unsweetened) pineapples or peaches. Throw it in the blender or spoon it into a bowl. Either way, you get one of the five daily servings of fresh fruit that could cut your risk of cancer.
Plain fat-free or low-fat yogurt is a Best Bite if there ever was one. Unfortunately, that’s not the way most people eat it.
The Next Best
People who would never let a sip of chocolate milk cross their lips think nothing of eating a cup of sweetened yogurt. Yet an eight-ounce cup of Dannon Lowfat fruit-on-the-bottom has six teaspoons of added sugar. A glass of Hershey’s Chocolate Fat Free Milk has four.
Now you’re talking 240 calories in a snack that many people gulp down in 240 seconds. You could have spent the 100 calories from the added sugar on a banana or a couple of cups of low-fat microwave popcorn.
Judging by the calories in other brands—whose manufacturers are more secretive than Dannon—six teaspoons of sugar is par for the course for yogurts with fruit. (Flavored yogurts like coffee, vanilla, and lemon may have "only" four teaspoons.)
All that sugar means more calories and less calcium-rich yogurt.
Since the calcium comes from milk, that means you’re also getting less potassium, magnesium, zinc, etc. Plus, the sweeter the yogurt, the less likely you are to add your own fruit.
Still, if it’s a choice between sweetened yogurt and no yogurt, get the sweetened. Just try to pick the best ones. That means the most calcium and fruit and the least added sugar.
But while food labels list calcium and sugar, there’s no way to tell how much of the sugar comes from the milk and fruit and how much is added.
So we gave Honorable Mentions to yogurts that kept the calcium up to at least 300 mg (30 percent of the Daily Value) in eight ounces.
Just because a yogurt didn’t make an Honorable Mention doesn’t mean it’s dishonorable. More than a few just missed the cutoff for calcium. When push comes to shove, most yogurts are more nutritious than most ice creams, frozen yogurts, or prepared puddings.
One more thing: If coffee’s your flavor, you may end up with an unwanted shot of caffeine. And, in most cases, there’s nothing on the label to clue you in. For the record, an eight-ounce container of Dannon Lowfat Coffee Yogurt contains 45 mg of caffeine. That’s about what you’d get in half a cup of brewed coffee. Six ounces of Horizon Organic Nonfat Cappuccino have 25 mg. Dannon Light Cappuccino and Stonyfield Farm Nonfat Cappuccino have none.
The Least Best
Why did some lines strike out?
Too little calcium. A few brands—like Colombo, Jell-O, Light n’ Lively, SnackWell’s, and some lines of Breyers—had less calcium than their competitors. Is that because they have more sugar? Or is it because other brands have more milk solids? The companies won’t say.
Artificial sweeteners. Though the aspartame (NutraSweet) in "light" yogurts cuts calories to 100 or less, its safety isn’t 100 percent certain.
Heat-treatment. SnackWell’s is heat-treated to get rid of the off-flavors that arise when chocolate mixes with the acid made by yogurt’s beneficial bacteria. Unfortunately, the heat also kills the bacteria.
The information for this article was compiled by Wendy Meltzer.
See link for comparison chart