The deep freeze.

Ice cream. Ice milk. Fruit. Juice. Yogurt. If it can be frozen, it'll eventually show up--impaled on a stick--in your supermarket's freezer case.

The nasty stuff is easy to avoid: that Haagen-Dazs Bar with as much arteryclogging saturated fat as two McDonald's Quarter Pounders; that Ben & Jerry's Peace Pop with the sat fat of three glasses of whole milk.

But what about "lowerfat" frozen desserts? Are they as virutous as their labels imply? Or are they frozen frauds?

FRUIT-ON-A-STICK

What? You were expecting frozen-fruit-on-a-stick?

Fruit-in-the-name, sugarin-the-bar is more like it. Even our "Best Bites" contain added sugar. But at least they give you a shot of real fruit or juice. Most others are little more than sugar water.

To increase your odds of picking more fruit, make sure that the bar contains at least ten percent of the Daily Value (DV) for vitamins A or C. The more of each, the more fruit ...unless the C comes from added ascorbic acid. Check the ingredient list.

While you're there, look to see that fruit or fruit puree is the first or second ingredient (after water or non-fat milk).

But watch out for bars with "apple juice from concentrate" or "grape juice from concentrate" high up in their ingredient lists. Chances are you're getting mostly cheap concentrate, with a few drops of some other juice added to justify the bar's name.

Take Minute Maid Fruit Juicees. You want the Cherry flavor? Minute adds a touch of cherry juice concentrate to its sweetened apple juice concentrate, then tosses in a little Red 40 and Blue 1 coloring and some artificial flavor. You'd rather have Orange? No sweat. The company replaces the cherry concentrate with a little orange concentrate.

If you don't feel like doing all that label work, just shop our chart. Among the besttasting "Best Bites" are FrozFruit Raspberry and Strawberry, as well as Edy's (Dreyer's on the West Coast) Savage Strawberry.

Skip the coconut flavors. They're full of saturated fat.

YOGURT BARS

If you're going to make something into a frozen treat, yogurt's gotta be healthier than ice cream, right?

Somebody apparently forgot to tell that to Kemps. Its five-ounce Frozen Yogurt Bar has 17 grams of fat. That's almost as much as a Nestle Drumstick, for pete's sake. It's loaded with cream (the first ingredient), its chocolate coating is full of coconut oil, and it has more sugar than yogurt.

Why use up almost three-quarters of your daily saturated fat allowance on a bar like Kemps, when you can enjoy one of Haagen-Dazs's scrumptious Frozen Yogurt Bars? Except for the Cherry Chocolate Fudge flavor, they've got a single gram of fat and almost no saturated fat. Ditto for Lucerne Nonfat Chocolate and FrozFruit Non-Fat Fruit and Yogurt Bars.

ICE MILKS

In a perfect world, ice milk bars and sandwiches would be lower in fat and saturated fat than those made with ice cream. And lower-fat ice cream bars and sandwiches would have less fat and fewer calories than those made with regular ice cream.

So what kind of a world do Lucerne Vanilla Ice Milk Bars live in? A teensy 2 1/2-ounce bar has ten grams of fat--more than a Good Humor Chocolate Eclair ice cream bar.

And what about FrozFruit Sweet 'N Low Lower Fat Ice Cream Bars? Just one of them has as much saturated fat (9 grams) as a Big Mac and as many calories (180) as an Eskimo Pie.

Try Weight Watchers Chocolate Treat, a fudge bar by Kemps, Fudgstix, Lucerne, Supersicle, or East Coast, or a Yoo-Hoo Lowfat Ice Cream cup.

At least with these, you're getting what you expect from ice milk.

NON-DAIRY

Milk's not your thing? Not to worry. Frozen non-dairy snacks like Rice Dream and Tofutti have graduated from tubs to sandwiches and bars.

We would have flunked 'em.

You see, non-dairy doesn't mean low-fat. A Rice Dream Bar has as much fat as two Dunkin' Donuts glazed French crullers.

Heck. Non-dairy doesn't even mean low-saturated-fat. An Ice Bean Cookie Crumbles Bar has about as much sat fat as a McDonald's Big Mac.

Try a frozen fruit something--or a piece of fresh fruit--instead.