One thing I never say no to is yogurt. If I’m ordering a smoothie, I’ll gladly accept an extra dollop. A bowl with granola never fails to tide me over when I’m feeling peckish. Tzatziki with my pita? You bet. Between chocolate-covered pretzels and their yogurt-dipped kin, the latter wins every time.
Regardless of its form, yogurt just seems like the healthy choice. Yogurt has long been praised as a wholesome, nutritious food—the elixir of the dairy aisle. Over the past 25 years, yogurt consumption in the United States has grown 142 percent, and sales are expected to rise further. Yogurt checks all the boxes: It’s high in protein, which has lately made it an especially popular option among people on obesity drugs looking for a filling snack. Famous for its good bacteria, yogurt is the poster child for the widespread obsession with gut health. And in March, the FDA gave yogurt a boost by allowing brands to advertise certain claims about its link to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.
In yogurt we trust. But a lot of the yogurt that Americans eat isn’t all that healthy. Among the low-fat and plain varieties of the dairy aisle, many products are basically desserts. Danone sells YoCrunch cups, flavored yogurt with toppings such as M&Ms and Snickers pieces. One of the best-selling yogurt options on Target’s website is a Chobani cup that comes with pieces of cookie-dough. There are also versions with other mix-ins: s’more, mint-chocolate-chip, cookies-and-cream. If they all sound unabashedly sundae-like, they should. The line between yogurt and ice cream is a lot blurrier than you might think.
Yogurt is just fermented milk, but it’s greater than the sum of its parts. It has the nutrients of milk (namely protein and calcium) and beneficial metabolites, vitamins, and organic acids produced through certain kinds of bacteria. There’s a reason that yogurt—not milk or ricotta or sour cream—is sometimes said to be a weight-loss trick of the French. Regularly eating yogurt has been associated with better blood-pressure and diabetes control, stronger immunity, and improved weight management, Penny Kris-Etherton, an emeritus professor of nutrition at Penn State University, told me.
No wonder yogurt keeps selling. But the sugar, fat, protein, calcium, and caloric levels in supermarket yogurts range widely. Sugary flavorings and additives are how you get something that’s in the ballpark of ice cream, such as squeezable pouches of cotton-candy-flavored yogurt (which several brands offer). A cup of Greek Gods yogurt with maple and honey contains about as much sugar as five Oreos. These yogurts are still generally considered better than ice cream, if only because yogurt is made from fermented milk, but even that is contested. As David Merritt Johns reported in The Atlantic last year, a major nutrition study found that the health effects of yogurt and ice cream are surprisingly similar.
Even yogurt options that don’t look dessertlike can still be laced with sugar. A cup of blueberry Chobani might seem to be a solid breakfast option, but it packs 14 grams of sugar. Not all additives are detrimental. Some Oikos Pro varieties, with added protein, contain more protein than three eggs. But for food marketers, yogurt’s virtues are especially valuable in giving a nutritious sheen to products that may lack it. That yogurt is associated with so many healthy qualities helps “provide a more well-rounded indulgence product, while remaining a sweet treat,” as a report from the firm CoBank put it.
But even low-fat, zero-sugar yogurt isn’t always what it seems. The usual health benefits “do not apply” to all products that contain the word yogurt in their name,” Elena Comelli, an associate professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto, told me. Not all yogurt contains probiotics, the living bacteria associated with gut health. Depending on how yogurt is processed—in particular, if it is heat-treated—it may have only a few, or none at all. With yogurt-dipped snacks, such as pretzels and raisins, the yogurt is essentially frosting.
Some yogurt is seeded with probiotics after production, so Kris-Etherton suggests looking for labels that explicitly note that the product has “live and active cultures.” Still, according to Comelli, the number of live microorganisms in a product decreases the longer it is stored. And as I reported previously, whether the bacteria in probiotic yogurt actually has a meaningful impact on the gut is not entirely clear. Yogurt’s probiotic effects, if any, may last only if you eat it regularly.
As the New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle has written, “Yogurt, it seems, has performed a marketing miracle: it is a fast-selling dessert with the aura of a health food.” Categorizing food with that aura of health is convenient, a heuristic that helps time-strapped people make good food decisions, or so people think. Yogurt—like kale, quinoa, and chia—make us feel good about what we’re eating, all the more so when it is, in fact, tasty. But if a food or nutrient has a “health halo,” people will eat just about anything associated with it: sugary protein bars, fatty plant-based burgers, kale chips.
Yogurt captures the best and worst of America’s approach to eating: the desire to optimize health without giving up junk. “Healthy indulgences” have become an American necessity, producing paradoxical inventions that include probiotic sodas, keto gummy bears, and skinny margaritas. Perhaps we’d be more satisfied without the rigmarole. An M&M-studded yogurt won’t make you healthier, so just enjoy it for what it is: dessert.
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