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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.""
That Activia stuff seems to help with irritable bowel syndrome (which in turn was caused by a $300/month starbucks habit). My wife is a dietitian and recommended I try it out.
Now what we need is probiotic coffee so I can go back to a caffeine-fueled frenzy and finish this project I am working on.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
TMI WARNING! If talk of bodily functions disturbs you, go to the next post... ...With that in mind, I've had measurable success with taking probiotics ( in pill form ). I suffer from IBS, and suppose I can be called "overly regular". Since taking probiotic pills, I've notice more "normal" feeling, um, functions. Even if I stuck to a good diet, things were different until I did the probiotics.
Theres been some research, and lots of controversy, suggesting that the overabundance of antibiotics in our food, as well as the overuse of them by doctors and such, is just ruining our GI tract. There's lots of people walking around these days who probably cant' even remember what a normal bm is anymore. But ya, probiotics do appear to help.
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
I'm surprised no-one ever went so far as labelling water as fat-free.
Haven't you seen fet-free cooking oil spray ? It's main ingredient is canola oil, but it's fat free because each 0.5 gram serving contains zero grams of fat (rounded down).
I saw a product on TV advertised earlier today: Vicks First Defense. It's an anti bacterial hand spray you can use after you've shook hands with someone or pressed a button in a left/elevator etc. I've been doing those things for years, and the worst I've had a little cold.
I'm not saying don't wash your hands after using the toilet and don't take precautions with food, I'm just worried we're going too far. If we don't use our immune systems they'll become weak, and we'll be wiped out by some bug in the next century or so.
Come on people, we surivived for years without all this over-sanitisation, I'm sure we can survive a few colds and a bit of stomach flu!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Have you browsed the yogurt aisle at your local grocery store lately? You need to actually read labels to make sure you're getting the stuff w/ live, active cultures. Ditto sour cream. If you're lucky, maybe 3 brands out of 20 will have the stuff. These days, it's not the no-brainer you make it out to be.
Method of processing duck feet
IIRC - the bacteria is not common for the US. In fact it is uncommon for most of EU.
It is Lactobacillum Bulgaricum and relatives which are originally from the Balkan peninsula (you can guess from the name). Even now in the remote mountain areas of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Northern Greece and South Eastern Serbia if you leave milk outside it has a very fair chance of becoming a proper yogurt naturally. This does not happen every time though and that is the reason why people add some of the old yogurt in the new milk to start the fermentation. The difference between Lactobacillum produced yogurt and other yogurts is that lactobacillum can ferment even buffalo milk to yogurt without starting to produce nasty ketones and the smelly stuff we usually associate with bad milk. In addition to that once the fermentation has taken place the product is surprisingly stable and can survive up to several weeks in the fridge without any extra preservatives. For reasons not completely understood even today outside its native region native Lactobacillum does not last long so any place using it has to refresh its stocks regularly from the Balkans.
Danone got their hands on Lactobacillum and started producing decent yogurt after buying the biggest Bulgarian dairy food producer Serdika in the 90-es. Before that their yogurt had the taste of condensed rancid piss fortified with non-sour cream (same as the yogurt still made by most other manufacturers nowdays). Now it is more or less edible. It is not anywhere close to the real stuff which you can get in the Bulgarian, Greek or Macedonian mountains (I sometimes feel like killing someone for a jug of buffalo yogurt), but it can actually be eaten.
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Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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 bacteria they add are normally found in traditional yogurt. These newer yogurts are just reintroducing some of formally common lactose digesting bacteria that are believed to be beneficial to humans. The sugar in milk is lactose and it is found only in the milk of mammals. As a result, the only bacteria that can digest lactose are found in the digestive systems of mammals, specifically breast feeding 'younglings' and milk drinking humans. Yogurt is made when these bacteria are allowed to feed off of the lactose in milk, which results in the creation of lactic acid. Lactic acid gives yogurt it's tart taste and prevents the growth of other BAD bacteria. In old-world yogurt, there are a bunch of different bacteria that can be found in yogurt, many with beneficial qualities for our health. In industrial yogurt production the process is controlled and limited to only two specific bacteria that are only prized for the ability to produce yogurt very quickly. Yogurt is historically a middle eastern food, b/c the preservative power of the lactic acid would help keep the yogurt safe to consume for some time. In northern Europe people developed the ability to digest lactose into adulthood, an ability that most people and other mammals do not have. There was an article on /. a few weeks ago about this same ability having been found to have developed in a tribe in Africa just in the past few thousand years.
I highly recomend the book "On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen". In fact, on Amazon, they show the section about Milk and human history in the excerpts. It is really pretty fascinating information regarding this subject.
You people and your slight differences disgust me! - Prof. Farnsworth
Another common probiotic is cheese. Yup, cheese is made by adding bacteria to milk to sour it, then adding rennet to curdle the soured milk, then straining, pressing & aging the curds. An unpasteurised cheese will contain lots of lactobacilli (and if a blue cheese, penicillium), as well as the other strains responsible for the particular cheese's distinctive flavour.
And then there's keffir, a drink made by fermenting milk. You can buy it in the store these days, where it tastes something like runny yoghurt.
Still, the best use of microbes in food has got to be beer. As the wise man said, beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Sshhhh! Don't let the Americans know it's French!
Boil some milk. Let it cool to ~40oC. Stir in some (live!) yoghurt and leave where you leave your bread to rise it all day. Quite thick, isn't it? Now pump it through some industrial food processing machinery. You'll probably find it's not thick any more. Add gelatine. Thick again? Good....now you can sell it.
They seem to use starches of various kinds in the UK, rather than gelatine. Same reason, though.
The weird flavourings are there because they're cheaper than real things with flavour, and the small amounts of real things are there so that they can put them on the label. In any case, putting lumps of, say, strawberry in a yoghurt doesn't produce strawberry flavoured yoghurt...it produces yoghurt-tasting-yoghurt with lumps of strawberry in it. The sugar is there because there isn't enough real stuff with sugar in in there, and because people seem to like their yoghurt sweet. Personally, I prefer to buy plain yoghurt and add unrefined dark brown sugar.
I tried the Activa last year and had to quit eating it before I even got through the first 8-pack. It made me itch, particularly on the back of my neck and ears. I liked the flavor and texture (very creamy), but I guess I was just allergic to something in it.
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It all comes down to livin' fast or dyin' slow. -REK, Jr.
I don't know if Dannon paid the NYT, but it sure does feel like it. Anyway, the Activia line is great, but as many posters have pointed out above hardly anything new, and by far not my favorite probiotic product (Yakult, forever). But it's a shame that from looking at the US site, they're not commercializing the best Activia flavor currently marketed in Brazil, oatmeal. Who cares about strawberry, peach and other regular yogurt flavors? I can get better tasting strawberry yogurt from other brands...that's much harder when it comes to oatmeal yogurt.
As for Activia, the company does not claim that it reduces the risk of specific medical conditions like constipation. Rather, Dannon says, it "can help regulate your digestive system by helping reduce long intestinal transit time."
I believe we used to refer to that as diarrhea. Activia should have a warning label: "Do not consume before long staff meetings! (Unless you're into that sort of thing.) And please, for the love of god, do not eat and fly. Thank You, The Other Passengers."
I think you're mixing up correlation and causation there. Yes, chronic disease has taken off- because the *acute* diseases that used to kill us don't anymore. I think we forget just how bad life used to be for most people.
Cancer and heart disease used to kill people too- the people who weren't killed by smallpox, TB, random bacterial infections and a host of other lethal diseases that we don't get anymore, not to mention the tons of people who didn't even make it out of childbirth, mother and child alike. It wasn't even that long ago- my grandmother-in-law grew up on a farm, had no prenatal care at all and managed only two grown children out of four- the other two died within days of birth. The average human lifespan in 1900 in the US was well under 50- most 40 year olds don't die of cancer/heart attacks today, and most didn't then either.
And I have to call you on tooth decay. That's *always* existed- ask George Washington (if you could) about that. He probably would have decked you- it made him miserable for his entire life. Most people without modern medical care have utterly horrible teeth by age 40. Meanwhile, I have to haul my 41-year-old butt into the dentist for a crown on a cracked tooth tomorrow- it should last the rest of my life.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Actually, lentils are dried in sensible countries using the traditional air-drying method. They might freeze-dry them in the US, but the lentils I buy in the UK are dried by passing warm dry air over the wet legumes.
Flour is scarcely empty carbohydrate, given that the bleaching is intended to raise the level of gluten in the flour and gluten is a protein. And which bleaching are you concerned about? The chemical variety (which is bad) or the slower air based process?
Given that I've just pointed out two staple foods that are actually produced by taking a food product and *exposing* it to the air I think your argument is already holed and taking on water. But lets look at some other common foodstuffs:
Most meat is actually prepared by allowing it to hang (in the open air). You'd find unhung beef, for example, too tough to eat. In some cases (such as high quality ham) the meat is hung for so long it desiccates and becomes cured, meaning it can be stored in the open air without refridgeration (NB, the best way to store such cured meat is in a cool place covered in a cloth so that the air can still get to it, but flies can't). The same is true of cheese.
Some foodstuffs require exposure to the air to complete their maturation: notably bananas and apples. You'll also ruin a good camembert by sticking it in a fridge or in a sealed container: that's why the fancy ones come in wooden containers. To keep the bacteria alive. It'll be edible, but it'll just taste like soft plastic.
Some foodstuffs are actively harmed by sealing away from the air: mushrooms stay fresh longer of they are allowed access to the air. Stick a mushroom in a sealed container and it'll liquefy. (The reason that mushrooms sold in supermarket-style plastic wrap don't liquefy is that they are not in contact with the air: the gas in the container is nitrogen).
As the son of a physician and husband of a medical student, TheMohel's attitude isn't particularly surprising. All too often, physicians have to watch as patients eschew real medicine for "naturopathic" remedies. Even I've seen a friend stop treatment for multiple sclerosis and spend thousands of dollars on magic "natural" pills being sold by a huckster. It's disgusting to see seriously sick people preyed on. I would guess that's where TheMohel's negativity comes from.
On the other hand, there's a big difference between trying to cure cancer with St. John's Wart and trying to stave off cancer by eating healthfully.
Mod my comments down. It'll be fun.
.. in thinking that Activia tastes like medicine?
The UK bans unpasteurised products? That's funny--the unpasteurised cheese I regularly buy at Waitrose, Sainsbury's, and the local farmer's market must all be illegal!
FYI, pasteurisation is not required here in the UK, nor is it required almost anywhere else except the US. There is no good reason for it at all, particularly in the case of cheese, where any cheese older than a couple of months is harmless for anyone with a normal immune system who is not pregnant. People can take care of themselves, if food is properly labelled and people are educated; in the same way I do not eat dish detergent, a pregnant woman would not eat unpasteurised cheese. If you doubt the viability of this, consider the fact that most countries in the world do not require pasteurisation, and yet (miraculously!) do not have particularly high rates of related illnesses, miscarriages left and right, etc.
Just because you can't doesn't mean your ancestors couldn't. Humans chase down prey largely by endurance, sure, a cheetah can run 60Mph for a few hundred yards, but he won't recover enough to repeat that dash when the 10 "cave men" catch up. Humans are pack hunters like many others, and humans, like many other hunters, use cammaflauge and stealth to get close enough to the prey to kill. And besides, .1% of anaimals is a pretty wide variety of animals compared to the 10 or so varieties we depend on today as food sources. The survivors of the Ice Age that killed off almost all Homo Sapiens all those Millenia ago were known to be huge meat eaters, dining on the wicked fast shellfish that gathered on the shores of ancient Africa (HUGE piles of proto-oyster shells are ample evidence of the evolutionary presence of meat in our diets). Insects were likely another mainstay (termite mounds keep several African villages alive as I recall). Small rodents and infants of other species could be easily captured by humans working in groups. You think we just happened uppon domesticated sheep one day?
Any thoughts you have that proto man had a concious and would choose death over killing are comical. Our ancestors were brutal survivors living on the edge, domestication of animals is one of the things that gave us the spare calories to invent things like morals.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
Thank you, and yes. I have no problem with people trying to eat healthy foods, and my Pop-Tarts comment was irony (which is a dangerous thing on Slashdot), but there is no actual scientific evidence that live culture yogurt does very much for you. It's not harmful, and nobody is foregoing any particular treatment by eating it (unlike the St. John's Wort example, which I've seen). My negativity is the same that I have for any salesman claiming too much for their product.
I have an astonishing fact for people: Activa was created in marketing focus groups, the message was polished to a fine luster with interviews with consumers, and the only reason it is being sold is because its manufacturer wants to make money. This is the way of the world, and I don't even object, but there aren't any altruists here. The product doesn't have to have any value beyond being marketable and, in this case, it really doesn't.