Yoplait Healthy Heart Yogurt. Strawberry, Harvest Peach, Strawberry Banana and Cherry Orchard. 79 cents per 6-ounce container.
Bonnie: No problem with cholesterol or concerns about your heart? Pregnant or nursing? Then skip Yoplait Healthy Heart and take your pick from the other yogurts in your supermarket's dairy case. This new Yoplait Healthy Heart yogurt, which contains plant sterols, is only for non-pregnant and non-nursing adults who need to lower their blood cholesterol levels.
Plant sterols appear to lower LDL-cholesterol (referred to as bad cholesterol) by inhibiting the absorption of cholesterol in the small intestine. To get that benefit, you must ingest about 1 gram each day as part of a diet low in fat and saturated fat. (A container of Yoplait Healthy Heart contains 0.4 grams of plant sterols.) Also, you must keep consuming plant sterols, as their effect on blood cholesterol stops when you stop using it.
Yoplait Healthy Heart joins already existing plant sterol-containing supermarket products Take Control and Benecol margarines and Minute Maid Heart Wise orange juice. Should you buy Yoplait Healthy Heart or any of the other plant sterol products? This is one case where your health provider's opinion is more important than mine.
Carolyn: These days it's getting harder and harder to tell the supermarket refrigerator case from the over-the-counter drug aisle. The latest and greatest of these new medi-foods is Yoplait Healthy Heart Yogurt. I say greatest because unlike Heart Wise orange juice, Healthy Heart Yogurt tastes virtually identical to its plant-sterol-free counterparts, and with its wealth of fruit, actually tastes better than many regular yogurts. And unlike Benecol, the price has not been jacked up to heart-attack-causing heights. (It costs only a dime more than regular yogurt.)
Kellogg's All-Bran Bars. Honey Oat and Brown Sugar Cinnamon. $3.69 per 7.04-ounce box containing six individually wrapped bars.
Bonnie: Surprise, surprise. Yet another cereal bar has just hit the supermarket shelves. These new granola-style bars contain no trans fats, a decent 5 grams of fiber, and are made with both wheat bran and Kellogg's All-Bran cereal. But they're not as good for you as the cereal.
A bowl of All-Bran provides 100 percent of the daily recommended amounts of both folic acid and vitamins B6 and B12, and is a good source of potassium. One of these bars provides only 10 percent of those nutrients and contains no potassium.
All-Bran Bars are higher in fiber and lower in sugar than many other cereal bars. They're also quite dry, which is only one of the reasons I recommend washing them down with a glass of milk (the other is milk's nutrition).
Carolyn: All-Bran is late on the list of cereals to become a portable bar, and it's easy to see why. That cereal is sold largely to people with fiber issues. All-Bran is basically breakfast Metamucil, and this light 'n' puffy bar version is presumably for people who want to go while they're on the go.
The taste is better than I expected. You can thank the prominence of the honey and oats in that variety for that. Both varieties taste better than many soy-based energy bars.
DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza. Four Cheese, Pepperoni, Supreme and Three Meat. $3.49 per 7-inch frozen pizza.
Bonnie: Remember when frozen pizzas tasted more like cardboard than food? Now, fortunately, there are rising-crust pizzas from both DiGiorno and Freschetta that actually rival pizzeria pizza in taste. These new DiGiorno Rising Crust Microwave Pizzas purport to produce this same-quality pizza in the microwave.
I'm sorry to report that's far from the truth. The pizzas are convenient, and the crust does rise in the microwave, but the quality is no match for the stellar rising-crust oven varieties. This crust is simultaneously doughy and crunchy, with a lot more dough than toppings. That's why DiGiorno microwave pizzas contain fewer calories, less fat and less sodium than the ones from the oven.
I'd be more satisfied having a smaller piece of the much-better-tasting oven versions and certainly don't mind the extra 11 to 15 minutes cooking time for that better quality.
I'm sure you would, too.
Carolyn: Up until now, microwave pizza has been uniformly dry and tasteless. That includes the supposedly premium but greatly disappointing Stouffer's Deep Dish line.
DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust single-serve pizza is all that Stouffer's Deep Dish should have been. It has a moist interior (probably because they've buried the tomato sauce under the cheese) and a crisp, thick crust that's a near-clone of regular DiGiorno. The first good sign: A minute after you put the pizza in the microwave, it smells like bread baking.
With this introduction, DiGiorno immediately becomes the best microwave pizza in the supermarket (which is not to say they have a lot of competition). Keep in mind, though, that you're saving no more than 15 minutes over regular DiGiorno, which also comes in a one-person size and still does produce a slightly better texture.
That means I would mainly recommend it to pizza lovers who are also type A's.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed the Way We Eat (Quirk). Each week they critique three new food items.
© Universal Press Syndicate