ColbyCosh.com

Sublime, my man. Sublime. It is the weird moods that engender the best stuff.

You definitely need to do the same type of article for the toothpaste aisle. I fear you may lose your mind in the attempt but seeing how you took down Jack Nicklaus, Carl Sagan and the Chrome browser I'm sure you can do it.

I dunno. Aside from the blandly generic (albeit couched) curmudgeonly nostalgia for the yoghurt aisle of your youth, you mis-spelled "Danone."

Also, I have no idea what the cranberry juice thing you're talking about is. UTI?

I think it needed to be more funny.

Thanks for the informed criticism, fellow who doesn't know what the American subsidiary of Groupe Danone is called!

In anticipation of the fate of your NNA entry (like I even know what that is), I have submitted your article for rejection on Fark.com. Bonne chance.

Update: rejection achieved.

Shoulda led with "toilet anxiety."

This column proves what I have always known, that Cosh and the National Post are just slaves to the interests of Big Yogurt. When will people wake up? The big yogurt industry has destroyed our environment and is bringing in record profits, and yet Cosh glorifies them as "modern-day Jesuses" (I haven't actually read the article but I imagine that's in there).

Gosh, never would have guessed you hadn't read it.

If I were speaking to the second-largest city in Kyrgyzstan about Colby's last comment, I would be able to say "Osh, Cosh be 'gosh'!"

My beef with the modern yogurt industry (which itself is not a pretty mental picture) is that it is now getting nearly impossible for those of us without weight issues from obtaining yogurt.

If you go to your average Sobeys or Safeway or Superstore or SaveOn or some other grocery store beginning with "S", you will find a lot of diet yogurt.

You'll also find a lot of low-fat yogurt. And fat-free yogurt, and fat-free with Omega 3, and fat and gluten-free, and everything low- and -free you can think of.

What you increasingly cannot possibly find is regular yogurt. If you're not a fat-ass and want a good creamy full-flavoured can of it, good luck: you can sometimes find it in those small fruit-cup sized units. As for the big half-gallon pail, you're out of luck. Organic yogurt has pretty much the fat I'm after, but its easily 225% the cost of the non-organic equivalent, and its hard to justify supporting the enviro fringe for any reason.

FACLC,

Stonyfield makes a fine whole milk yogurt. I don't know if it is organic or not, but who cares?

And I can see the whole digestion-cleansing scam thing in medicine. There's a regular (hah!) radio ad for something called 'Evercleanse' that's supposed to remove 5-20 pounds of waste matter in your colon (?). I don't know how these people live with themselves. I know that my colon is self-cleansing.

Regarding the toothpaste and yogurt aisles... How much of the new products and strange marketing are the work of Wal-mart's pricing policies? Wal-mart expects, nay, DEMANDS, that the price of a product should drop from one year to the next when negotiating with their suppliers.

If Oral-B were never to introduce a new toothbrush, Wal-mart would relentlessly force them to keep reducing their margin year after a year on the same product. But wait! This year we have a new brush with different bristles, that vibrates, and even doubles as a marital aid! And as a new product Oral-B can set a new price point.

I suspect the same marketing forces -- Wal-marts elephantine market share, to be exact -- are behind the "bacteria of the week" trend in the yogurt industry.

Another helpful tip for your next trip down the yogurt aisle: women use it topically and internally to cope with vaginal yeast infections. Oddly enough, they don't mention this time tested remedy on the yogurt containers.

FACLC:

Liberté's Mediterranneé-style yogurt, unflavoured.  10% milk fat, and tastes almost as good as the stuff I got in Crete.  Where I come from (Calgary), you can buy it in 500 ml containers at Safeway and Co-op.  Superstore used to carry the Liberté brand, but the local ones stopped a while ago.

Shame.  Their flavoured stuff's a cut above, too.

Is every comment above from a man? If so, I may have something to contribute here, re: women's toilet-related health and sanity.

Women have HORMONES. And before you're all like "I KNOW," let me reassure you that you do not know ANYTHING about it until you have been cruelly impacted by their biological mischief. I didn't know the first thing about it until my first pregnancy, and it's been a digestive hellride ever since.

Also, you perhaps have never allowed yourself to imagine the traumatic impact to the colon of the birthing process, which might be contributing to this - how did you phrase it? - toilet anxiety.

Maybe when everything goes totally crazy in that department and no one has a cure and then someone says, "Eat this! It's tasty and helps you poo!" women can be forgiven for popping open a can of superstition every day for 14 days, or their money back.

Oh, boo hoo. You try eating 12 McDonald's hamburgers in a sitting then get back to me about digestive hellrides.

And here I thought "Mad About You" was off the air.

If legitimate female troubles are going to be the pretext for a sudden, universal change in the texture, appearance, and consistency of a familiar food product, then I'd like to see some convincing evidence of effectiveness even if no woman on the planet is interested in doing so before throwing handfuls of bills at the cashier (that seems to be the unstated premise of your argument—GOD, LACTO-WHATEVER, SOUNDS GREAT, HAND OVER THE CARTON ALREADY BEFORE I SPLIT OPEN LENGTHWISE).