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Something in Your Food is Moving
Dekortage writes "The New York Times has a report on probiotic food: food that has live bacteria in it. From the article: "[for Dannon's] Activia, a line of yogurt with special live bacteria that are marketed as aiding regularity, sales in United States stores have soared well past the $100 million mark.... Probiotics in food are part of a larger trend toward 'functional foods,' which stress their ability to deliver benefits that have traditionally been the realm of medicine or dietary supplements.""
Maybe if the food industry didn't fuck so much with food to maximize profits in the first place, people wouldn't have so many troubled stomachs?
While from the article I can gather there is merit to probiotic food, let's hope it does not become another coöpted marketing fad whereby anything and everything is labelled probiotic just for the sake of riding the coattails of the success of producs where such bacteria do make health sense and is important.
I can forsee this parallelling the fat-free craze where they'd (food companies) label things which always were naturally fat free labelled as being-100% fat free (implying that competing products not labelled so did have fat.) I'm surprised no-one ever went so far as labelling water as fat-free.
Too late, there has been an explosion in probiotic products in the UK. My favourite advert is for Danone Activia.
They say in the advert that they have it to a group of women and asked them how they felt afterwards. Of course most of them described some kind of improvement in their wellbeing. I'd bet money that they'd say the same thing if you gave them custard and described it as a breakthrough in healthcare.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
Active yogurts have been available in the US for decades if not centuries. Activa is just the first product that I've seen to specifically mention its active cultures as a cure for certain ailments in its advertising. It's really just new marketing (and good marketing, IMO).
Yes...I am a rocket scientist.
Saying that yogurt has live bacteria in it is like saying water has H_2 O molecules: of course it does! Here is a wiki link that describes pretty accurately, to the best of my knowledge, the bacteria species that makes yogurt out of fresh milk.
Dannon's products should be avoided. The worst brand-name yogurt in Bulgaria is theirs. It has the most artificial taste of all the surrogates that are sold as yogurt. If you have tasted the real thing, you will recognise their product as junk food (as long as you are not a junk-food addict :-) ).
In fact the over-sterilisation of our environment has been linked with the rise in immune disorders such as asthma.
I was always tought that it's good to let children get covered in mud occasionally so their immune systems get a good workout - and this was years ago. Seems that this advice is becoming accepted again.
Yes, I'm afraid US food is dead. Go to any US supermarket and all you see is food in plastic bags. Once you leave the produce section, the whole supermarket looks like a morgue full of sealed body bags that contain once living foodstuffs that have been killed/hydrogenated/frozen/sealed/irradiated to extend their shelf life. Man I miss the open air market in Gif sur Yvette.
Think global, act loco
Here's a link to the AFFSA (the French FDA) report [PDF warning][French warning :-)] on the Lactobacillus Casei yoghurt. They found all of the manufacturer's claims "unverifiable" or "unsupported", except one, which they advised on changing to: "takes part in the process of reinforcing natural defenses".
They patented it and called it a healthy sounding name.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Eh? It's not marketing bullshit at all. The Organic Foods certifications are strict and hard to get - if there's so much demand for organic, why do you think the scale of production hasn't reached saturation level yet? It's because it can take years for a farm or other producer to get organic certification after they stop using inorganic fertilisers, pesticides etc. It's punishingly hard and mostly it's the producers that have always been organic that are providing for now. Expect organic food to come down in price steadily, and please read more about the subject!
Good yogurt has always had live bacteria in it, and the health effects of eating that live bacteria are not news. The real difference is that Activia invented some fake-latin sounding names for their bacteria, trademarked 'em, and then used it in their marketing campaign.
Consumer Reports mentioned them a few issues ago, and said that a test of Activia's bacteria showed that only 0.1% of them survived the passage through the stomach. So the idea that they somehow aid digestion is rather silly.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
As a practicing physician you should know better. 90% of the 'food' on the shelfs of your local grocer is equivalent to cardboard when it comes to nutritional value. It's all been injected with just enough vitamin content to be called a food when really it's nothing but sugars and starches and a little bit of cotton seed oil (which is toxic if unprocessed) to hold it all together. Perfect example is Pop-Tarts. You'd die of a wide variety of vitamin deficiencies if all you eat are Pop-Tarts... which is how a lot of kids live, on the edge of vitamin deficiency, and we wonder why they have difficulty paying attention in class or why they come down with so many auto-immune syndromes.
It's 'professionals' like you who lead the american citizens into seriously unhealthy lifestyles. Oh well, guess a guy's got to make a living and what would physicians do if everyone were naturally healthy?
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Frankly, I'm surprised European cheese producers have never launched a WTO grievance over our bizarre pasteurization laws, which mostly just keep European cheeses out of our markets. Research has shown that pasteurizing cheese increases the chances of a pathogenic strain of bacteria taking hold, since there will be no competing bacteria to inhibit the pathogen's development should one take hold.
I'd comment on the cigars too, but I'm not American so it wouldn't really mean anything. At the job I do to pay for school, I sell several cuban cigarillos a day (and usually at least one pack of American cigars). Ironically the cubans that we have are of very low quality, so the Americans sell rather better -- entire packs at a time rather than singles. Funny how these things work out.
The dangerous bacteria are ones that live in people (or other mammals) already. when you get exposed to these bacteria, they have the upper hand because they're already adapted to living in the mammalian colon, but your immune system hasn't adapted to keep that bacteria under control. And the bacteria may not be perfectly adapted to your system, so it may over-produce itself or its byproducts, making you sick -- something that your own native flora usually don't do.
I don't know about Yoplait. But Dannon (standard Dannon yogurt, not just the Activa stuff) still announces "contains active yogurt cultures including L. acidophilus." I don't know where you get the idea that it's illegal. Ingrediant-wise. There's some geletin and your standard acids and phosphates but the top ingrediant is still "Cultured grade A low fat milk"
. . .not sterilize it.
.it even says 'contains live cultures' on it.
I didn't say anything about sterilizing.
. .
No, "it" doesn't.
KFG
Less than 0.1% of sperm survive the passage through the vagina and fertilize an egg. Is the idea that they somehow aid reproduction rather silly?
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Real yoghurt (and real cheese) are available in the U.S., but typically only at high-priced cheese shops, specialty stores, or similar venues that escape notice from regulators.
Bullshit. Several brands sell real yogurt. Stonyfield Farms is sold widely in almost every supermarket in Massachusetts, probably elsewhere. Just because it's not available where YOU are doesn't mean it's not available.
IIRC, it's illegal (as much so as Cuban cigars), but the market for the stuff is alive and well (again, pun intended), and the customers are loyal and happy to pay.
Uh- the only thing that is "illegal" is unpasteurized products, and with mostly good reason. The US isn't alone- the UK and many other countries ban unpasteurized products.
Perhaps if people stopped eating animal products they wouldn't be constipated...
The human body is not designed to consume animal products. Humans can't chase and kill 99.9% of wild animals. Humans would never naturally suck milk from a cow's breast, or from any other animal's. Humans might naturally eat the occasional egg, but that's about it.
But hey - you were brought up to believe that killing animals is 'normal', so let's not question it!
i know i'm coming to this thread late, but your post reminded me of a theory i recently made. Morality is a luxury and a by-product of technology. Civilization and its evolution is a sort of social technology. (YHIHF!) We can afford to think about women's rights because we aren't running away from lions and wolves. We can argue about the morality of eating animals for pleasure because we aren't spending all of our daylight hours working the fields or chasing down a gazelle. We can learn about Nietzsche because our fellow humans aren't trying to take our land and females. Similarly, the rich can buy paintings, while the poorest of us might resort to crime to buy food. How can one care about history or math when one is hungry or under constant threat of death? Therefore: World peace or utopia will be the result of technologies that bring everyone out of hunger, fear and envy. It won't be diplomats or peace activists who bring us peace. It will be scientists and companies making things to bring luxuries down to the masses.
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