Your complete guide to choosing a yogurt to meet your needs

Feeling dazed and confused in the yogurt aisle? Here's some information to help you make good choices.

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Image: © jenifoto/Getty Images

Yogurt used to be pretty straightforward. It came in small, simple containers, with a swirl of fruit on the bottom if you were lucky. Not anymore. Today there's Greek yogurt, shakes, and tasty-looking cups with sprinkles and crushed cookies. Yogurt is blended into smoothies and squirted into portable tubes and pouches. Over in the ice cream aisle, there are even more options, with a variety of frozen yogurt products in tubs and handheld popsicles.

This gives you lots of choices but might also leave you wondering which one to pick. At the root of the dilemma is this question: is yogurt a health food or a dessert? The truth is, today's yogurt can be either, depending on the type you choose. This means you've got to do a little detective work to figure it out.

Before we get into details about how to sort the good yogurt from the bad, let's talk a little bit about why you want to eat yogurt in the first place.

Yogurt and your health

Yogurt is a nutrient-rich food that fuels your body with protein, calcium, magnesium, vitamin B12, and some key fatty acids that your body needs to stay healthy.

Studies have also shown numerous health benefits for regular yogurt eaters. For starters, they are thinner than people who don't eat yogurt, she says. But truthfully, it's still not totally clear whether eating yogurt will slim your waistline. It's possible that people who eat yogurt are thinner because they have better eating habits over all. But what yogurt can do — particularly yogurt with a high amount of protein — is keep you feeling full, which might help you eat less and lose weight.

The pros of probiotics

Yogurt also contains probiotics, which are live microorganisms similar to those in your gut. Yogurt is made from milk, with a dash of bacteria to kick off the fermenting process. Yogurt contains at least two specific types of bacteria, Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus.

Research today is making some important connections between the types of bacteria that live in your body and your overall health. Studies have linked these bacteria to a wide variety of conditions ranging from mood disorders to infections. Some studies suggest that having certain types of good bacteria may help insulate people from certain health woes. There is some evidence that probiotics, like those found in yogurt, can help improve symptoms of some digestive problems, such as irritable bowel syndrome and certain types of diarrhea.

Another promising area of research is the role of gut microbes in obesity. Researchers have found that people who are lean and people who weigh too much typically have different types of gut bacteria, says Dr. Stanford. This raises the question: can people lose weight if you change the type of bacteria in their bodies? Researchers are searching for this answer right now, says Dr. Stanford.

Gut bacteria and your weight

So, does this mean that if you pick a certain type of yogurt with specific types of live, active cultures, it can help you lose weight or treat specific health conditions? We don't have the answer yet. Even though so far, the FDA hasn't approved any probiotics to treat specific health conditions, that hasn't stopped some yogurt companies from promoting the health benefits available from their brand's unique probiotics.

Scientists are working on it. Someday, doctors may very well be able to tell you what specific yogurt cultures or probiotics to eat to solve your stomach problems or to help you drop those extra pounds.

Your yogurt checklist

Now that we've discussed the potential benefits of yogurt, let's talk about how to actually pick a good one from the dairy case. To simplify the process in a sea of choices, it's best to focus on five ingredients.

Sugar. Your yogurt should ideally have less than 10 grams of sugar per serving. Yes, the yogurts with crushed cookies and peanut butter chips are tasty. But they're a treat, not a health food. Eat them in moderation.

Protein. Yogurts high in protein can promote satiety (the feeling of being full), which could help you combat that weight gain that happens to many women after they go through menopause, says Dr. Stanford. Look for yogurt that has 5 grams or more of protein per serving. Greek-style yogurt generally has more protein than other types of yogurt, sometimes as much as 16 grams.

Live and active cultures. As we mentioned earlier, yogurt isn't officially yogurt according to FDA standards without S. thermophilus and L. bulgaricus. Look for them on the label. Some brands of yogurt will feature a "Live & Active Cultures" seal from the National Yogurt Association (NYA). The NYA provides voluntary certification to companies that make yogurt, and the seal tells you that the brand has at least 100 million cultures per gram at the time it's manufactured. Some brands add multiple types of live and active cultures to their yogurts, which is fine, but be skeptical of specific health claims made about various probiotics.

Taste. If you don't like it, you won't eat it, so find a brand that is not only good for you, but also one you look forward to eating.

Simple ingredients. Try to pick yogurt with a short ingredient list. Less is often more.

Frozen yogurt: Dessert or health food?

Frozen yogurt is not the same as traditional yogurt. Unlike traditional yogurt, it doesn't need to meet any specific government standards to call itself yogurt, and sometimes it's not actually yogurt at all.

Some brands of frozen yogurt do contain live and active cultures. Surprisingly, freezing doesn't kill the live microbes, but it may essentially put them to sleep. They wake up from their dormant state only after they thaw inside your body, according to the Natural Yogurt Association (NYA). However, if a frozen yogurt does have live and active cultures, it will often have fewer of them than its refrigerated counterparts do. The NYA requires refrigerated yogurts to have 100 million cultures per gram in order to bear its "Live & Active Cultures" seal, but a frozen yogurt product needs to have only 10 million cultures per gram. (As with traditional yogurt, some brands of frozen yogurt may meet this standard but opt not to go through the voluntary process to get the seal.)

In other instances, frozen yogurt may have no live, active cultures at all — for instance, if the manufacturer uses yogurt that has been heat-treated, a process that kills the cultures. Or the maker may just stir live, active cultures into the recipe and skip the fermenting process used to make yogurt. Yogurt must be fermented to get the NYA seal.

The bottom line: When it comes to frozen yogurt, check the label carefully. There may be some healthy ones out there, but in many cases that tasty tub of frozen yogurt is just another dessert.