Yo, Sugar

YoCrunch, the jig is up. It was bound to happen. Now that Ben is Mr. Big Kindergartener, his emerging powers of initiative and ingenuity have brought him to this: Breyers yogurt-candy combo cups—the ones Will insists on buying, despite my shrewd observations about their convenience-food cost, not to mention their astronomical sugar content.

Are you familiar with these little phonies? Fifty cents (on sale) will get you 6 ounces of Breyers yogurt, packaged with a cute container of granola or candy on top. By “cute,” I mean there’s about a tablespoon of bonus additives to the product, which (according to the package) “makes it easy to have fun & enjoy a healthy snack.”

Healthy? Ha! The strawberry kind featuring the “100% Natural Lowfat Granola” packs 190 calories, including 27 grams of sugar. That’s about 6 ½ teaspoons’ worth in 6 ounces of yogurt—I call that high density! Another strawberry version comes with a “cute” serving of M&M candies. That ups the sugar content to 31 grams, or nearly 7 ½ teaspoons of the sweet stuff—200 calories in the M&M YoCrunch, roughly the same as a full-sized Hershey’s Heath Bar.

So it’s bad enough that we have YoCrunch in our ’frig. But last night, Ben turbo-boosted his yogurt. He left the living room in search of a snack and came back a few minutes later mixing up some YoCrunch. “I’m making this extra good,” he exclaimed. “Uh-oh,” I said, admittedly amused. “Did you mix in 2 candy toppings?” I guessed.

“No, 3!” Ben boasted from behind his mouthful.

Miraculously, Ben bedded down compliantly as usual an hour later. But I hope this incident convinces Tom to reconsider his shopping habits. It’s only a matter of time before Ben skips the “Yo” and consumes only the “Crunch.”