Athenos Greek Strained Yogurt. Plain, Blueberry, Honey, Peach, and Strawberry. $1.50 per 5.3-ounce flavored yogurt or $3.99 per 1-pound tub of plain.
Bonnie: Greek-style yogurt sales have doubled in each of the past five years. Athenos is Kraft's entry into this exploding category, its first yogurt offering since 2004. (Athenos is Kraft's Mediterranean-style foods brand, offering feta, gorgonzola and blue cheeses, hummus and pita bread.) Athenos comes either plain or in a dual compartment, with yogurt in one section, fruit or honey in the other.
All Athenos varieties are nonfat, whereas Chobani and Fage also offer higher-fat options. All the sweetened Athenos varieties have 100 calories, 11 grams protein, 15 percent of the recommended daily value of calcium and 9 (blueberry) to 27 (honey) grams of sugar per 5.3-ounce container. A much-larger cup serving of the plain contains 140 calories, 23 grams protein, 30 percent of the recommended daily value of calcium and 6 grams sugar, and could make a good calorie-saving substitute for mayo or sour cream.
Athenos is tangier than either Chobani or Fage — whether that's a good or bad thing is a personal preference. I do applaud Kraft's efforts to be natural, using cranberry and black carrot juice, not red dye, to color the strawberry variety.
Carolyn: I don't know if Greek yogurt is healthier than the American kind, but it certainly tastes like it is: tangier, gamier, like the way American yogurt tasted when only hippies ate it. This is not a good thing. Even the fruit compote in the adjoining cups doesn't contain enough sugar to make this new value-priced, flat-packaged Athenos brand taste really good.
Only the honey add-in is sweet enough to make it palatable, although I had to supplement the honey Athenos supplied with some of my own to be able to finish the whole cup.
One possible reason Athenos doesn't taste better: All its flavors are nonfat, versus the more indulgent 2 percent- and 5 percent-fat ones offered by competitor Fage.
Hungry-Man Pub Favorites. Chopped Beef Steak, Beer Battered Chicken, and Grilled Bourbon Steak Strip. $3.59 per 16-ounce frozen meal.
Bonnie: "Hungry-Man meals are geared toward a specific demographic typically consisting of men ages 18 to 34 who have big appetites and need more food to feel satisfied," the publicist for these new products e-mailed me after learning we wanted to write about Hungry-Man's new one-pound "pub-style" meals.
I guess she was trying to prepare me for Hungry-Man's new one-pound Beer Battered Chicken and Roasted Potatoes in Cheese Sauce, with its more than 40 lines of ingredients serving up more than half the fat (33 grams), 40 percent of the saturated fat (8 grams) and 75 percent of the sodium (1,810 milligrams) suggested for an entire day, along with a horrid chemical aftertaste!
The other two are only a smidgen better nutritionally. At least those beef meals include some vegetables — green beans with bacon or carrots and broccoli.
I guess that neither the makers of Hungry-Man nor the publicist have read the latest research that teens could lower their later risk of developing hypertension, coronary heart disease, heart attack and stroke by 30 percent to 43 percent by reducing their average daily salt consumption by 3,000 milligrams. Not buying these Hungry-Man dinners would be one place to start.
Carolyn: You might think this new Pub Favorites Hungry-Man sub-line would feature bar food. They're really dishes containing alcohol, a favorite of this brand's he-man demographic.
The press release announcing this line also talks about "bold flavors," but that is only compared to really bland regular Hungry-Man. These do taste good — the fat and salt Bonnie just rambled on about are the building blocks of appealing flavor, after all.
Quality and texture are more in question. The meat in the beef dishes is mealy (the beef steak) or fatty (the Bourbon steak). And without a reflector sleeve, neither the batter on the Beer Battered Chicken or the bacon on the string beans crisps in the microwave. No "hungry man" is going to wait 40 minutes to cook these in a conventional oven. The mashed potatoes and veggie medley in the Bourbon Steak comes right out of a Swanson TV dinner tray circa 1960.
There is a certain appealing nostalgia to that. But the Beer Battered Chicken is the only one of these I can recommend for regular 2011 consumption (preferably after long heating via retro regular-oven method).
StarKist Tuna in Pouches. Yellowfin Tuna in Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Low Sodium Albacore Tuna, and Low Sodium Chunk Light Tuna. $1.79 to $2.19 per 2.6-ounce pouch.
Bonnie: StarKist is offering more individual portions of tuna that you can literally eat out of the pouch, as no draining is necessary. New inside are two low-in-sodium offerings and one containing yellowfin tuna.
Canned tuna is not considered high in sodium, typically providing only about 10 percent of the current daily recommended limit. (Most of that sodium comes from the preservation methods used by fishermen to prevent spoilage.) Still, having the option of buying tuna with only 5 percent (the chunk light) and 3 percent (the albacore) of that limit is all to the good.
Yellowfin is known as ahi when sold fresh and is one of the largest tuna species that's "canned" as light tuna. This is just the first time it's been labeled as such and packed in a pouch along with olive oil — thus giving it more fat and calories than the other new two offerings. A serving contains 190 calories, 13 grams fat and 300 milligrams sodium (or 10 percent of the recommended limit).
All three — albacore, light and yellowfin — are decent sources of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids. For this reason, I recommend them.
Carolyn: I tried these new lower-sodium tunas beside their full-sodium canned counterparts with the idea of finding out if tuna suffers from having less sodium. They don't. What impressed me even more was pouched tuna's far superior texture (canned is mushy by comparison).
I was also struck by how much better and more like fresh StarKist's also-new yellowfin tuna in extra virgin olive oil tasted. I'm not sure whether to credit the yellowfin tuna, the olive oil or some combination, but like Bonnie, I give all three of these new offerings a thumbs up.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. She has an interactive site (www.biteofthebest.com) about products she recommends. Follow her on Twitter: BonnieBOTB. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "The Great Philly Cheesesteak Book" (Running Press). Each week they critique three new food items.
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