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.""

Comments

Trouble stomachs

[Lazerf4rt]

The fastest way to consumers' hearts may be through their troubled stomachs.

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?

Lactobacillus bulgaricus

[Maimun]

Bulgarians consider their country as the original inventor and genuine producer of sour milk, which is called "yogurt" in English. I dunno if that is true or not but in my humble experience, Bulgarian genuine yogurt is much tastier than any alternative I have tasted; those include several North American brands of yogurt that I tried in Canada and a brand of Greek yogurt sold in Canadian Oriental food stores.

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 :-) ).

Re:Activia

[linzeal]

They patented it and called it a healthy sounding name.

Re:Activia

[Otto]

Perhaps someone here can tell me, what is the real difference between this fancy 'Activia' brand, and normal live culture yogurt (such as the Yoplait custard style I've been eating for 20 years when I want yogurt)?
 
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.