How Yogurt Boost Your Health

Many health professionals believe that absolutely everyone should supplement with probiotics, unless they’re eating plenty of yogurt with live cultures. “By maintaining good gut flora, you’ll prevent all kinds of different diseases, especially chronic ones”, says my friend, naturopathic physician Sonja Pettersen, N.M.D.

“Probiotics help control inflammation, which is a central feature of so many degenerative diseases, including heart disease. Probiotics, like the bulgaris found in the yogurt in Bulgaria, help increase NK cells (a powerful immune system weapon). They increase antibodies when we have infections. They improve digestion. They have anticancer properties”.

And they clearly boost immune system. Probiotics may also have a positive effect on blood sugar. An article in the August 2007 Journal of the American College of Nutrition reported that daily ingestions of tablets containing powdered fermented milk (yogurt) with lactobacillus reduced elevated blood pressure in mildly hypertensive patients without any adverse side effects whatsoever.

THE ACID TEST
You can give you immunity a boost and increase your energy by either taking probiotics as a daily supplement or by eating plenty of real yogurt. Remember, yogurt is just milk that was left out to sour, so it’s a naturally fermented food that’s allowed to develop its own bacteria (just like sauerkraut or any other fermented food). “The more acidic the yogurt is, the more likely there’s good bacteria in it, “Pettersen says. “The product has to actually contain live cultures”.

The National Yogurt Association (NYA) has developed a “Live and Active Cultures” (LAC) seal for the yogurt label to identify yogurt that contains significant levels of live and active cultures. Be aware that a label stating “made with active cultures” does not mean the same as the LAC label. The LAC label means that the yogurt contains at least 100 million cultures per gram of yogurt at the time of manufacture and after pasteurization.

In addition to boosting your energy by helping your immune system do its job more effectively, probiotics may actually have an unexpected side benefit. Just as this book was going to press, a study in the May 2, 2008, Journal of Psychiatric Research found that probiotics may have an antidepressant activity. Although the study was done on rats, the evidence was compelling. To my mind, anything that improves mood boosts energy.

Probiotics might wind up boosting your energy in more ways than one.