Housekeeping

Thursday, December 01, 2005

Yoo-Hoo vs. Horizon milk boxes

We used to buy Horizon Organic chocolate milk boxes to put in our kids' lunches. The key feature is that they don't need refrigeration. Recently I compared the nutrition information between these and Yoo-Hoo, and was a little surprised (these are both for an 8oz serving size):
HorizonYoo-Hoo
Calories180130
Fat5g1g
Saturated Fat3g0.5g
Cholesterol20mg0
Sodium160mg180mg
Carbs27g29g
Sugar27g20g
Protein8g2g
The vitamins and minerals are similar; Horizon has a little more calcium and vitamin D, Yoo-Hoo has a few minerals that Horizon lacks.

By almost every measure, the Horizon milk is worse for you than Yoo-Hoo. Now, certainly there's something to be said for the fact that Horizon is organic and doubtless far more natural than Yoo-Hoo. However, Yoo-Hoo is so much lower in the two ingredients we really care about with our kids -- fat and sugar -- that, combined with the fact that Yoo-Hoo is about half the price, we've switched to Yoo-Hoo going forward.