Dunno! The thought of sweetened yogurt grosses me out. In fact, all yogurt does, largely because of the name "yo-gurt". I can eat skyr if I mix it into other things or make labneh out of it.
(Following up on your edit)
Because it's more caloric than plain yogurt, for otherwise the same macro profile.
Ewe's milk yogurt is more caloric than plain cow's milk yogurt (because of higher fat content). Does that make ewe's milk yogurt "worse for you than UPF yogurt"?
Put two identically sized servings of yogurt side by side, equal in all aspects except that one is 100kcal and the other, because of added sugar, is 170kcal. The 170kcal serving is less healthful; the other is a UPF.
So, I haven't made any yogurt in a while but from memory it takes about half an hour for milk to set, depending on what milk and what yogurt starter etc. No way you can make an emulsion of e.g. milk, sugar and vanilla that is stable for that long. So either you have to use stabilizers, or you have to accept that your flavourings are not going to be evenly distributed throughout your yogurt.
I can't know the latter since I can't buy that brand in Greece (for rather obvious reasons it's not imported here). If I look at the list of ingredients for e.g. the Vanilla Bean yogurt I see "Pasteurized Whole Milk, Pasteurized Cream..." and that's your stabilizer there.
How much is there? The "Nutrition Facts" label on top lists "Total fat 12g" per serving which is "1 container" of 140 grams. That's ~9% fat, so about 5% more than plain cow's milk (at 4g per 100g). The total fat is more than the fat in ewe's milk (about 6%). I ... guess the extra fat makes the milk and vanilla bean powder emulsion last a bit longer so it gets better mixed in during the fermentation time?
Dunno. The packaging says "Traces of vanilla seeds and marbling on top of the yogurt are the results of a natural infusion process". The other flavours don't have a similar disclaimer but they all have extra fat in the form of pasteurized cream.
So anyway you get both a stabilizer and uneven distribution at least for the vanilla. If you have a strong enough flavour I reckon that's not a problem though.
EDIT: (The fruit-at-the-bottom variants are presumably UPFs).
They don't have to. If you're just mixing some fruit in milk and then fermenting it to make yogurt, that's just processed (going by NOVA AFAIU). But looking at the ingredients list I see e.g. "Corn starch, Natural Flavor, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Pectin" etc. Ew. No, that's a UPF. You don't need to put that stuff in yogurt. Not if the point is to enjoy it.
It's late and I have to go to sleep so answering here.
>> No. Pasteurization isn't a UPF technique. See the problem?
My argument is that the extra fat is used as a stabilizer that wouldn't need to be included if the maker wasn't trying to force their yogurt to hold other stuff in it than milk. The use of a stabilizer makes it a UPF, not the fact that the cream is pasteurised- that makes no difference as you say.
I'm exclusively commenting here about how the label "UPF" is problematic. Pasteurization doesn't make something ultra-processed, despite its stabilizing effect.
Nobody said that pasteurization makes anything ultra-processed.
Pasteurised milk is classified as Group 1 (Unprocessed or minimally processed food) in NOVA. Pasteurised cream is the same thing [1].
Pasteurisation doesn't have any stabilising effect.
I argued that the pasteurised cream added to the ingredients of the lafermiere yogurts is a stabiliser. The stabilisation effect comes from the increased viscosity of milk with added fat that helps the emulsion of milk and flavourings keep stable for longer than normal while milk sets during yogurt making.
I did not argue that the stabilisation effect comes from the fact that cream is pasteurised.
I argued that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the addition of pasteurised cream as a stabiliser.
I did not argue that the lafermiere yogurt is a UPF because of the pasteurisation of the added cream; or the milk itself for that matter.
And now I have to ask: in what sense could anything I said before be taken as a claim that pasteurisation is ultra-processing or that the lafermiere yogurts are UPFs because of pasteurisation?
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[1] If anything it has the opposite in that pasteurised milk tends to produce looser, softer curds than raw milk because it weakens protein bonds and causes calcium to leak out (soorta), hence the addition of calcium chloride to milk when making cheese.
Cream is usually made by centrifuging milk to separate the fat out, which should count as minimal processing and then pasteurisation itself is minimal processing on top. I doubt pasteurised cream counts as a UPF.
To be fair that doesn't really matter in yogurt making because milk is boiled anyway, which denatures milk proteins and we don't care if they leak calcium or not because we're not trying to make curd, as such, but yogurt. Not withstanding the fact that people in the Indian subcontinent call yogurt, "curd". Just a linguistic quirk.
The fact that lafermiere list milk and cream as "pasteurised" in their ingredients is probably something to do with marketing, to make it clear they aren't using raw milk, for whatever reason that might be necessary to clarify.
My fresh Rodopi ewe's milk yogurt lists as ingredient "full organic ewe's milk". They say nothing about pasteurisation and I doubt they even bother to pasteurise it since they're going to blast it with considerably more heat than for pasteurisation anyway. OtoH the difference may not be marketing but the fact that Rodopi get their milk directly from producers while lafermiere buy it second hand from dairy companies that sell it already-pasteurised. I mean the pasteurisation doesn't hurt. It's just unnecessary. So it's a bit weird that they clarify it in the list of ingredients.
You've lost me completely, sorry. I'm backing out now. The only reason we were talking was that you seemed to be asserting that it wasn't possible to do a non-UPF sweetened yogurt product, which, obviously no.
Yes that was my argument and it stands. The Kalona yogurt you showed is not UPF but I think the honey might be only in the bottom. The lafermiere yogurts are UPF.
You're not confused. You're right. That's my point. "UPF" is not a useful health labeling system. Whether or not something qualifies as a UPF doesn't tell you whether it's a healthy choice.
The most unhealthy food choices tend to be UPFs. But that's not a causal relationship.
I think the confusion is that you're loosening up the relation: food can be unhealthy without it being UPF. The relation is an implication, not an equivalence: UPF implies unhealthy. Unhealthy doesn't imply UPF.
So e.g. food with too many calories as in your example can be unhealthy because it can make you fat without it having to be a UPF.
Are you saying that you want a classification that flags up every kind of unhealthy food?
(Following up on your edit)
Because it's more caloric than plain yogurt, for otherwise the same macro profile.