Is Frozen Yogurt a No-No?

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 frozen 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