Yogurt

This article is part of a larger article titled "100+ Healthiest Foods On Planet Earth."  Read it here.

Almost everyone enjoys a delicious, creamy yogurt: be it low-fat, fruit yogurt, extravagantly thick and rich Greek yogurt, or something in between, these healthy foods are incredibly nutritious and full of calcium, protein and a number of nutrients that are beneficial to our health.

Help Lose And Maintain A Healthy Weight. The diets and lifestyles of more than 120,000 otherwise healthy and non-obese men and women from the United States were followed for around twenty years, from 1986 to 2006, with the follow-up periods being about four years apart. The purpose of the study was to determine whether or not the adage of “eat less and exercise more” was really as simple as it sounds when losing weight and maintaining a healthy weight.

The results showed that crisps, potatoes, sugar-laden drinks, red meat and processed meat were the largest contributing factors to weight gain; fruits, vegetables, nuts, wholegrains and yogurt helped people to lose or maintain a healthy weight. According to the research, yogurt had the greatest impact on weight loss, accounting for around 0.82lb less weight than the other foods.

Can Lower Blood Pressure. This study examined the antihypertensive, or blood pressure reducing, effects of yogurt on hypertensive rats. The rats were divided into groups depending on the diet they would receive, which would be either just skimmed milk; skimmed milk supplemented with freeze-dried, low-fat yogurt; or just freeze-dried, low-fat yogurt.

The results showed that the reduction in blood pressure was greatest in the rats that were fed the diets containing yogurt. For the milk/yogurt diet, systolic blood pressure was reduced by 3.7%, whilst diastolic blood pressure was reduced by 30%; in the yogurt diet, systolic blood pressure was reduced by 2.7% and diastolic blood pressure by 44%! Interestingly, the rats fed diets containing yogurt also experienced less weight gain than those consuming just milk.

Probiotic Yogurt Can Lower Cholesterol. A group of sixty type 2 diabetic men and women were divided into groups that either consumed 300g of a probiotic yogurt or 300g of regular yogurt every day, for six weeks. The results showed that the participants who consumed the probiotic yogurt experienced a reduction of 4.5% in overall cholesterol and 7.4% in “bad” cholesterol, when compared to those who had eaten the regular yogurt.

Can Allow Lactose Digestion In Lactose Intolerant People

Numerous studies have examined how yogurt is digested in the stomach and particularly how lactose is digested. Lactose intolerant people are generally unable to digest the sugar that lactose contains and often experience uncomfortable side effects such as bloating and diarrhea.

A recent review of the different studies into yogurts and lactose digestion has come to the conclusion that bacteria that is found in yogurt somehow protects the lactose, thus allowing it to be more easily digested to a degree that means that lactose intolerant people should not suffer the effects associated with their condition. The review also found that whilst both flavoured and plain yogurts had this lactose digesting effect, plain yogurt provided the greatest level of lactose digestion.