I appreciate your patience the last few days as I wallowed a bit – okay, a lot.  For me, it’s important to acknowledge and truly feel those feelings of sadness.  Without really feeling them, I don’t resolve them. And, while they’re not resolved now, either, make no mistake, I can at least breathe without an iron lung. Things are looking up.

With that, let’s move on to one of our usual topics – food.  This time, I want to talk about yogurt.

This weekend, my dad got stuck with me at went to Kroger with me where I proceeded to take photos of a whole bunch of labels.  I’ve included a slideshow of the yogurt labels here.  You’ll see that the ranges of calories, carbohydrates and sugars is just wild, which is my point.  All of these yogurts are stacked in the dairy case, side by side like they are all the same thing.

When I worked for American Eagle, people walked into the airport and bought tickets on us, on Delta, Northwest, United or US Airways.  They bought the tickets based on route structure and brand loyalty, not really on product since all the carriers offered basically the same thing. (Although my aunt Judy insisted that we at AMR were harder on her luggage and , based on the gorilla in the old Samsonite commercial, she called us, “Gorillas in the mist.” Can you imagine?!) Anyway, my point is that all the ticket counters were stacked together like yogurt in the dairy case.  While we don’t have that “all yogurt is created equal” conversation consciously in our heads, we do assume that the products all the same.

Look at the pictures, and you can clearly see that they’re not.

Some of these things have more sugar per serving than ice cream. No lie!  Yet, they are all being marketed as a healthful breakfast food.  While some of them are, the majority of them are just not.

Here are side by side comparisons by the container:

And, by the ounce:

To put this into perspective, Edy’s Slow Churned Vanilla Bean ice cream has:

Ice cream has fewer calories per ounce than five of the yogurts I found at the grocery.  The ONLY category where yogurt wins every time is in protein. It always has more, if only a little.

Meanwhile, it is ALL marketed as a healthy lifestyle choice when, sometimes, it would be more accurately marketed as a dessert.

As with all processed food: caveat emptor, or, as we say in the South, “Be careful whatchu buy, y’all!”

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