Does yogurt make your diet healthier?

Today's nutrition newswire includes results of a new study showing that women who eat yogurt frequently are less likely to be overweight and generally have more nutritious diets than women who don't.  In particular, yogurt eaters seem to get more calcium and vitamin D, a nutrient that we've been talking about quite a bit on the blog lately.

The study was conducted at the General Mills Bell Institute of Health and Nutrition. Now I don't want to be cynical but I do have to wonder what kind of "research" we're going to get out of an institution that's run by a corporation that is in business to sell products. Not that I think that the researchers would deliberately falsify data, just that the research design is likely to be oriented less towards expanding our understanding of nutrition and more toward producing findings that will make good press for the products.

So what does this study really add to our understanding about health and nutrition? Does it prove or even suggest that eating yogurt keeps you thinner and healthier? Not really.  It simply demonstrates a statistical correlation: healthy people who eat nutritious diets are more likely to eat yogurt than those who don't.  If you're overweight and subsist on junk food, adding yogurt to your diet is not likely to peel off the pounds.

Nonetheless, I expect that the PR folks at General Mills will parlay this "research" into a bunch of press releases, headlines, and ultimately ads, suggesting that eating yogurt makes you thinner!

Your thoughts?