Yoplait Kids! Now with more food geek!

A while back - oh, say 10 or 30 years ago - there was this television commercial for yogurt where the pitch (or the hook or whatever you call it in ad-talk) was something like "yogurt is the panacea for all bodily ills and eating a daily portion of the creamy stuff will enable you to live long and far into old age, far beyond the point where you've broken even with your previous Social Security deductions and now the government begins sending you free cigarettes on your 100th birthday in an attempt to get you off the dole."

To drive home the point, they had a bunch of thousand-year-old Bulgarians sitting around a fire pit eating from a vat of yogurt.

At least that's the way I remember it.

No matter...I was sold on yogurt even before I ever knew it was good for me.

Now Parent Bloggers Network is taste testing Yoplait Kids brand yogurt and I've been sent on assignment to find out whether or not yogurt and all its yummy probiotics really will keep me alive until well into the year 2066.

Until that update, I asked my kids to sample the Yoplait Kids yogurt and tell me their thoughts.

9 year old: It's good! Yeah, I like it. Tastes like strawberries. (It was strawberry yogurt, so well-done Yoplait.)

7 year old: I LOVE this yogurt. It doesn't have chunks of stuff in it. It's smoooooooooth.

My seven year old - if you haven't guessed - has a bit of a "thing" when it comes to chunks of stuff mixed in her food, and any foods with dueling textures are usually given a big thumbs down and a Yuck Face. Yes, among the neurotypical children of the world, food sensory and sensitivity issues are reserved for the well-fed and indulged middle class kids of industrialized Western nations. But this is our food sensory issue/indulgence and we're fond of it.


As a mom, I'm going to give Yoplait Kids an overall thumbs up.

Here's what I like:

25% Less Sugar

Okay, sure, if I were completely on my parenting game, my kids would be eating bowls of tart plain yogurt that I made from the milk of free-range goats living in our backyard. I would have introduced this lip-puckering unsweetened yogurt to them from infancy (made first from my breast milk, of course) and then firmly but kindly - but mostly firmly - insisted that they continue eating only this unsweetened yogurt, even through their difficult picky-eater stages.

However, for reasons X,Y and Z, force-feeding unsweetened yogurt didn't happen, and now there's just no putting that sour old genie back in the yogurt container, no matter how much I extol the delight which is "real" yogurt. My kids still need a little bit of sugar to make the Lactobacillus bulgaricus go down. 13 grams of sugar per 4 oz serving, to be exact. Compare that to the 31 grams of sugar per 6 oz serving of the generic fruit-on-the-bottom yogurt I just ate (hey, I like "candy yogurt", too) and you can see that Yoplait Kids is moving in the right direction.

Omega-3 DHA

As if Yoplait Kids isn't healthy enough with the 5 grams of protein per serving and 20% the Daily Value for calcium and all that live friendly bacteria (Live Friendly Bacteria...good name for a rock band), Yoplait goes ahead and adds 16mg of Omega-3 DHA per serving. That's 10% of the 160 mg Daily Value for DHA .

Now, we can debate the precise health benefits of Omega-3 DHAs. And we can argue whether or not and to what extent a few servings of yogurt a week might hedge your kids' chances of getting into Harvard over, say, Larry's University and Car Wash. However, I think that we can at least agree that this Omega-3 stuff isn't snake oil - algal oil, maybe - and that there are enough Google-able studies out there to indicate that, most likely, there's something good going on when it comes to Omega-3 DHAs and getting kids' brains to shift into high gear.

And what with the 20-hour SpongeBob SquarePants marathon yesterday, my kids can use all the high-shifting they can get.

My kids are slowly but surely getting hip to the awesomeness that is grilled salmon, i.e. lots of Omega-3, but until then, we'll take a cup of Yoplait now and again.


Beet Juice

Let's be honest: for all it's healthy goodness, Yoplait Kids yogurt does list some ingredients that I had to look up on the Internet to figure out what they were.

Inulin?

What the heck is that?

Maybe a kind of fish roe? A duck liver enzyme? An island off Greenland?

Turns out that inulin is type of fiber derived from plant roots.

From Wikipedia:

"...used increasingly in foods because it has unusual nutritional characteristics. It ranges from completely bland to subtly sweet and can be used to replace sugar, fat, and flour. This is particularly advantageous because inulin contains a third to a quarter of the food energy of sugar or other carbohydrates and a sixth to a ninth of the food energy of fat. It also increases calcium absorption^[2] and possibly magnesium absorption,^[3] while promoting the growth of intestinal bacteria."

Dang. Well you learn something every day! Sounds as if inulin will do you good!

Uh-oh....but just hold on there a second:

"Between about 30-40% of the population suffers from fructose malabsorption.^[12] Since inulin is a fructan, excess dietary intake may lead to minor side effects such as increased flatulence and loosened bowel motions in people with fructose malabsorption.^[13] It is recommended that fructan intake for people with fructose malabsorption be kept to less than 0.5 grams/serving.^[13]"

So, there you have it. Easy does it on the inulin if you're the gassy type. Or if you're hiking the Appalachian Trail. That's a lot of catholes to be digging.


The other ingredient that gave me pause was Beet Juice Concentrate.

Now, I'm thrilled beyond thrilled that Yoplait is using beet juice to color its yogurt. I mean, if you have to color your yogurt, isn't beet juice a better choice than Red #45728612? I think that the X-Files still have a case open on that food coloring.

However, word to the wise, it might be a good idea to destroy the cardboard Yoplait packaging in the grocery store parking lot and dispose of the evidence before you get the yogurt home. If my kids read that any food has beet juice as an ingredient - even cotton candy - they're going to do the Gagging Jig of Gagginess and not let the Red Beet Yogurt (as it will come to be known) pass their lips, no how and no matter that they carry the genes of generations borscht eaters.

Otherwise, beet juice! I'm all for it!

(It's also good for de-icing your driveway.)


Now, a few minor picky things.

Speaking as the beaten-down mom to at least one very picky eater, I appreciate the trials and tricks sometimes utilized in a fit of weakness when begging Skinny Little Junie to just east something, anything, besides whatever it is that Skinny Little Junie is hooked on eating that week. How can a child survive on strawberries and wheat toast? I have no idea.

And so I understand that some kids might need to know that Yoplait Kids is the yogurt that Dora the Explorer eats, and this might cajole them into trying something yummy and healthy and so Dora will usher in a life's worth of healthy eating habits to kids all over suburban United States.

However - and this is coming from someone who, remember, just allowed a day long SpongeBob fest - I'd at least like the option of purchasing Yoplait Omega-3 DHA yogurt without the added commercial. I know, there are a hundred other non-Dora brands out there, but this is the one I'm reviewing, so I had to say it.

Also, as I move away from purchasing products with more and more packaging in my attempt to move away from creating more and more garbage, I find that the yogurt brands I'm buying more often are those that offer large industrial-sized containers that I can then dish out into reusable single-serve bowls or lunch containers. With Yoplait Kids, I have individual single-serve containers and the cardboard packaging around them. I know that packaging is all recyclable, but something a little more eco-friendly seems possible. See what you can do about that, Yoplait people, wouldja?


But, all in all - and until that day that my sister sends me a goat to milk - again I have to say Yoplait Kids is a go.

Yummy, healthy, and now with more beet juice.

And don't forget the inulin. That was fun to learn about, wasn't it?

Hey! Yoplait Yogurt is making you smarter already!

See you in 58 years for the update on that Bulgarian thing.

Print a coupon for $1.50 off Yoplait Products!