Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
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 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.