Is Fro-Yo a No-No?

By Joe Wilkes

If you live in Los Angeles, you can't fail to notice that a new frozen yogurt shop is popping up on almost every corner. The wave has been led by the lightning-fast expansion of the Pinkberry chain. Various competitors like Red Mango, Kiwiberry, and Cefiore have also been multiplying like rabbits across strip malls, shopping centers, office complexes, and even casinos and hotels across the country. If they haven't hit your town yet, don't worry, they likely will. Starbucks founder Howard Schultz recently invested in Pinkberry and plans to make it as omnipresent as the coffee chain. Low in calories, with lots of healthy flora for your intestinal health, this new yogurt trend seems too good to be true—but is it?

The history of frozen yogurt

Dannon made the first frozen yogurt in the 1970s. It was sold in supermarket freezer sections in popsicle form—usually a frozen version of Dannon's tart berry yogurt but coated with chocolate or carob. Later companies like TCBY (The Country's Best Yogurt) began processing yogurt in soft-serve ice cream machines, adding more sugar or artificial sweeteners and artificial flavors to duplicate popular ice cream flavors and adding toppings, like chocolate chips, M&Ms, and crushed candy bars. Supermarket brands like Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry's also began adding frozen yogurt flavors to their ice cream lines in the 1980s.

In 2005, Pinkberry opened up its first store in Los Angeles, and the chain quickly grew to over 50 stores and spawned hosts of imitators. Many say Pinkberry is a knockoff of the Korean chain Red Mango; but whoever imitated whom, Red Mango has benefited from Pinkberry opening up the American market to this new/retro style of yogurt. Pinkberry's yogurt is a back-to-basics formulation, similar to what Dannon peddled in the 1970s. Pinkberry's yogurt is more tart than the TCBY-style yogurts and is usually offered in only two or three flavors (the chain offers plain and green tea, and more recently, added coffee). These new gourmet yogurt shops offer mainly fresh fruit toppings along with a couple of less-nutritious offerings, and they all tout the health benefits of the high levels of favorable bacteria in their yogurts, like Lactobacillus and L.acidophilus.

Is it healthy?

Yogurt is generally healthy. It contains cultures that are helpful to maintain intestinal health, has calcium, and is low in calories and fat. An 8-ounce serving of Pinkberry contains about 200 calories, 8 grams of protein, no fat, and about 32 percent of your daily value of calcium. The fresh fruit toppings are unsweetened and have negligible calories; so generally, Pinkberry yogurt makes for a healthy snack. Old-school TCBY has a few more calories but is similar to Pinkberry in its nutritional makeup. However, keep in mind that most of these calories come from added sugar, so they are more likely to turn into stored fat in your body if you don't burn them off. While its calcium content is also fairly decent, you'll get nearly twice as much calcium from regular non-frozen yogurt than you will get from the frozen kind. Non-frozen yogurt also contains more protein.

Things really go off track when it comes to toppings. Fresh fruit is a great option, but if you're just crumbling one candy bar or two and a dollop of syrup on top of your yogurt, it's pretty hard to claim that you're eating light. Also, if you're getting a pint of Ben & Jerry's with chunks of cookie dough and brownies swirled in, you're not really being as virtuous as you think. You would think that common sense would let you know this, but I think most of us have somehow fooled ourselves into thinking that toppings don't count when, in fact, they add up to more empty calories than the entire dish of yogurt. And when you put your yogurt into an edible cone instead of an inedible cup, you're adding even more empty calories to your dessert or snack—120 calories for a typical waffle cone.

In short, frozen yogurt isn't terrible for your diet, but it isn't a miracle food, either. It's a much better option than ice cream and its high levels of saturated fat, but yogurt doesn't necessarily have less sugar. It's better than cookies, cake, or candy, too, but it can't hold a candle to fresh fruit for something that satisfies your sweet tooth and makes you healthy at the same time. It'll be better for your figure and your pocketbook to simply have a bowl of fruit mixed with your favorite yogurt. Or, if you're after a frosty delight, try one of these chilly treats . . .

5 Healthy Frozen Treats

1. Frozen fruit. Even the worst cook can manage this one. Just pop some fresh grapes, strawberries, bananas, etc., into the freezer for a bit and pop them in your mouth. This is a recipe we offer in a lot of articles geared toward parents as kids who turn up their noses at fruit offered in a bowl will suddenly appreciate this new frozen delight.
2. Fancy ice cubes. Try pouring your favorite fruit juice into an ice cube tray and inserting toothpicks when the cubes start to get slushy enough to allow the toothpicks to stand up. You've made your own healthy mini-popsicles. For bartenders, this is also a great addition to beverages. Try a glass of seltzer water with some frozen lemon juice cubes on a hot summer day. It'll make you forget about lemonade.
3. Speaking of bartending . . . This tip's for adults only. Here's a professional bartender secret—they usually add extra sugar in frozen drinks. Why? It tastes better and it makes you thirstier! More thirst=more drinks=more sugar. You get the idea. When making your own margaritas or daiquiris on a hot summer day, skip the store-bought mixers and make your own from fresh juice and use as little sugar as you can live with. Also, add extra ice to the blender. You'll be able to make your drink last a lot longer and do a lot less damage to your diet.
4. Make your own sorbet. This is a little more on the gourmet side. But if you're willing to invest a little money in an ice cream/sorbet maker and a little time in making ice cream/sorbet, you can make delicious ice creams and sorbets out of fresh fruit and keep out a lot of the artificial colors and flavors and obscene amounts of sugar that many store brands contain.
5. Make your own frozen yogurt. If fruit and non-frozen yogurt is better for you than the soft-serve kind sold in yogurt stands, why not switch it up? Blend frozen fruit—berries, peaches, whatever your favorite is—with some plain yogurt. If you must, you can add a little sugar to make it a treat, but think about reducing the amount a little every time you make this snack—you'll begin weaning yourself off the sweet stuff. Before you know it, fruit and yogurt will be enough of a treat, and you won't even miss the crushed Oreos!