A Culture of Lies

Wow, that sounds all hard-hitting and newsy, doesn't it? While I think it would be really cool to do research and conduct interviews and write revealing exposés and stuff, I'm just way too lazy for all of that. Instead, I'm going to rant about yogurt. (Culture, get it? Ha! I've got
a million of 'em.) Speaking of being lazy, it seems like the media is all about reporting on Americans' horrible eating habits these days. In response, advertisers are rolling out tons of ads for healthy food products like soy milk, fiber bars, natural cereals, etc. And, of course, yogurt. Unfortunately, most of the yogurt commercials I have seen are either really annoying, or just downright untruthful.

I'm going to pick on Yoplait commercials in particular, because those are the ones that irritate me the most. First, there was a series of ads that featured two incredibly smug women. They had little conversations about the yogurt: "this is shoe-shopping good," "this is day-at-the-spa good," and so on. Ladies, do you really need to be so smug? It's just freakin' yogurt! And,  to imply that a cup of yogurt could be better than a new pair of shoes is just some kind of lunacy, in my book. New shoes are blissful treats that can brighten a bad day, and make you feel pretty and sexy; yogurt is a barely-tolerable dairy product that you eat just because it's good for you. (But we'll discuss that a bit more in depth in just a moment.) Over the next couple of years, Yoplait continued to produce more ads featuring a number of self-satisfied women, all purporting to have lost a great amount of weight by ingesting large quantities of their rancid dairy product.

Now, Yoplait has gone too far. They are introducing a new line of products, called Yoplait Delights, which they claim taste just like a parfait. That is just a lie, plain and simple. Yogurt does not taste like pudding, or cake, or pie. And it most certainly does not taste like ice cream. This treachery upon the good name of desserts should be stopped, immediately. Somewhere out there is a woman who needs to lose some weight. She keeps seeing commercials about yogurt…the health benefits, the weight loss, and she thinks, "How bad can it be? The commercial said it tastes like pudding/cake/pie/ice cream." When she tries it, though, she discovers what yogurt really is: a slightly sour, mildly clumpy cup of thick dairy substance that may or may not contain fruit. While it's not really horrible, it surely wouldn't qualify as dessert.

In case anyone thinks I'm being too harsh on yogurt, or I don't know what I'm talking about, consider this: I ate it every single day for six years. After I did Weight Watchers in 2002, I needed to find a low-fat way to get some calcium in my body before I managed to snap my femur like a twig or something. (I can't stand to drink milk.) Approximately 2,000 cups of yogurt later, I could no longer face it, so I switched to chocolate soymilk. It doesn't taste like real milk with Hershey's syrup, but at least there are no commercials trying to make me believe it does.