Yogurt as candy, candy as yogurt.

Yogurt is so good for you! Or is it?

On the yogurt-healthy-YES side we have plenty of articles easily found online, touting two or four or seven or any number of yogurt benefits (there's generally a number). And even people who weren't alive at the time remember the famous "In Soviet Georgia" commercial by yogurt conglomerate Danone, which showed people eating yogurt and living Methuselahesque years. Which may have all been nonsense, but that was the freewheeling seventies, where ridiculous claims were made routinely. Not like now, of course. 

What about the yogurt-healthy-NO votes? Well, first off let me say we are not going to address the vegan claim that eating dairy products is unhealthy on its face. Vegans have their own agenda, and we don't have time to pick it apart here. 

And we really don't have to, when products like Yoplait's Gushers are on sale. 

If you're not familiar with the candy Fruit Gushers, they are nominally fruit snacks for children, treats that have a sort of a soft outer shell with a liquid middle. Here we have a co-branded product, which is not hard since Fruit Gushers is owned by General Mills and Yoplait is owned by General Mills and dairy cooperative Sodiaal.

Does this look like health food to you?

How about the Fruit Punch flavor?

It's not unappealing in its way, but this is a long walk from all-natural yogurt, which is tart and separates and is milk-colored. Normal yogurt also doesn't contain these little "gushers" inside. You can see a little orb at the tip of the blue spoon. It is a soft bite that yields candy-blueberry liquid. In Soviet Georgia, they would not have known what to make of this. They might have thought People's Glorious Cooperative Chemical Plant #24 had started leaking again.

And speaking of yogurt and colors that don't appear in nature, Skittles has a product now called Skittles Dips. It's not Skittles with chewing tobacco; it's Skittles candy dipped in a yogurt-like coating. 

You can barely tell what color is what under the coating.

The coating is definitely yogurty in the sense that yogurt-covered pretzels and raisins are yogurty. Which is, about a dime's worth of difference from white chocolate. The insides are pretty standard Skittles, maybe a little larger, which play just fine with the coating. But is there anything healthy to these products?

The Yoplait Gushers have some redeeming qualities. All Yoplait yogurts have some vitamins, protein, potassium, calcium, and so on. Sugar, too, though. The Skittles Dips have a tiny bit of potassium, and that's it; not even any calcium. They are nutritional garbage.

What does it all mean? I guess that yogurt, like a lot of terms these days (peaceful protester, centrist, civil rights), means what people want us to think it means. Read the labels if you're concerned.

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P.S.: I liked both these products, but I'm not a health maven, so don't come to me for health advice. While I'm eating a little better these days, "nutritional garbage" is still in my wheelhouse.