I love yogurt, I always have. It's the breakfast, lunch, or dessert I never feel guilty eating. When I have time, I make it myself because it is surprisingly easy to do. The trouble is, I don't always have the motivation or the time and I wind up at the store in the yogurt aisle. This is where my utopian world of happy, dancing, free-range yogurts turns ugly.

Follow up:

Yogurt, according to wikipedia, has been around in one form or another for 4500 years. There's a reason for that. It's just fermented milk. You add bacteria and let it sit, and those healthy microbes turn lactose into lactic acid, curdling the milk and making it thick. Everything about natural yogurt is good for you – the calcium, the vitamins, and in particular the bacteria (“active cultures” or “probiotics”). These “good” bacteria make their way through your digestive tract and help maintain a healthy balance within the other bacterial flora (or is it fauna?) that live there. They help break down foods, make vitamins, and may even help with digestion, ulcers, and to prevent yeast infections and maybe even some cancers.

Now unlike yogurt, it's the grocery store where things have started to get complicated. 10 years ago you could pick from Dannon, or Yoplait, or even the store brand – but mostly what you had to decide was what flavor you wanted. Peach? Vanilla? Strawberry! Fruit on the bottom or blended? That's it. That's all you had to worry about to go home with a cup of creamy dairy goodness. These simple days are now completely gone, and gone forever and you are to blame.

People now expect and demand products that let them binge without concern for calorie or fat content. Diet this, fat-free that, trans-free, sugar-free, carb-free, salt-free, and supposedly guilt-free food! Now with added aspartame, splenda, saccharin, sucralose, and fortified with spray on vitamins and minerals!

Yogurt has “progressed” from 8 ounce, 175 calorie cups of naturally cultured milk to 4oz, 35 calorie mini-cups of manufactured gelatinized vitamin supplement. The first thing to go was whole milk, obviously. Milk is just crawling with fat, after all it is a nutrition source for neonatal animals. Cow's milk has 3 1/4% fat content! Well that is certainly far too much and this kind of abuse needs to stop, and stop now. The first step is using skim milk to make yogurt obviously. Skim milk has close to 0% fat content and far fewer calories than whole milk. The trouble is when we make yogurt from skim milk, it is surprisingly thin and watery. This is easily fixed by adding pectin (a carbohydrate from fruit), starch (a carbohydrate from plants), and gelatin (a protein extracted from the bones, connective tissues organs, and some intestines of animals). Now we just need to extract out some of those pesky carbs, add in a little artificial sweeteners and spray in some vitamins; voila, processed yogurt product! The end result is something like milky shampoo.

All of this effort, all of the marketing hype about our 'special' bacteria does this and that, our fat-free, carb-free cup-o-yogurt is in the end pointless, because what is left isn't yogurt at all but an artificial flavored, sweetened, and textured vitamin pill in gelatin form. Yogurt is cultured milk, not a gelatin spread.

Here's my quick and easy solution to this mess: have a cup of creamy, delicious, real yogurt instead, and skip that 175 calorie high fructose corn syrup can of soda. Eating shouldn't be about high-tech solutions, it should be about enjoying real, nutritious food.