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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.""
Activia, a line of yogurt with special live bacteria that are marketed as aiding regularity
Taco Bell should sue them for patent infringement.
Wheres the Gagh? [/wendys wheres the beef lady]
I've been eating Activia for breakfast every morning for probably 6 months, and haven't really noticed that it's doing any good in the gastro department. Maybe if I quit having vodka for dinner...
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Political discussion for a new world
that would be kombucha tea.
food that has live bacteria in it
What, like normal yogurt and cheese?
Although perhaps in the USA everything is sterilized? Seems a bit nuts to kill all the bateria (yogurt is essentially a culture of bateria) and then add them back in again.
In fact, I consume a good quantity of it on a regular basis. This is assuming that bottle-conditioned unfiltered beer counts.
Man, live yeast really gives you gas of doom, though.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I love that sensation of the probiotics crawling down my throat!
If I only I could get my wife to say the same thing.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
There have been probiotic yogurts for sale in Europe (or at least in the UK) for quite some time now. I lived there 2005-2006 and ate this stuff daily (yogurt tastes better there on average anyway).
If you ask me, the US has a long way to go before reaching the standards in terms of taste and healthiness (is that a word?) that grocery food has set in the UK, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.
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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
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.
Yes, they are common bacteria, known to be not harmful. Also, you eat lots of bacteria in many other foods anyway.
Keep in mind that there are a huge number of bacteria living in you and on you, most of them completely uncharacterized, and many of them probably essential for your health and well being.
WTF is this stuff doing on SlashDot?
Yogurt contains live cultures? No shit. Thanks for the fourth-grade science lesson.
Let's get a couple stories for the IQ > 60 set out here today, please.
Jesus Christ, are we really that disconnected from our food these days?
.bacteria.
Dude, bacteria is what yogurt is. It's milk, spoiled under controled conditions. Conditions that promote the growth of . .
For the past few decades commercial yogurt has been pastuerized, i.e, put under controlled conditions that kill bacteria. Don't do that and your yogurt remains live. That's all there is to it.
KFG
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.
Brazilian people (and people from other countries) have been drinking Yakult since ever, and this kind of yogurt was (and I quote) "invented by Kyoto University pediatrics doctor Minoru Shirota in 1930". Here in Europe there is the Danone's Actimel, that is basically the same (I tasted both, I know) but with a new brand and a massive advertisement.
I'm mentioning that because IMHO this article is nothing but advertisement, passing something as a technological evolution but in fact, unless 30s technology counts as one, its nothing but another way slashdot got to sell your eyeballs.
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
I can get your wife to say it.
Organic potatoes, apples, milk... I thought these were organic products by definition, along with beef, chicken and orange juice. Maybe I'm wrong and they're made in a lab from nylon and plastic... I'm sure it is better for us that they're not covered in quite as many pesticides but quite a few dangerous chemicals are allowed to be used and the product called organic so it's all marketing ****shit. And the stuff is about twice the price...
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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 :-) ).
The primary "benefit" delivered by Activa is indeed that of the dietary supplements (and not a few medicines), which is to separate the victim from their available cash and deliver fuzzy science and placebo effect in return.
There is limited data that active culture supplementation can reduce diarrhea duration in acute gastroenteritis, although the studies are small. The effect in irritable bowel syndrome is contentious, but then virtually everything in irritable bowel syndrome is contentious, including the existence of the syndrome as such. In already-healthy people, Activa has no well-supported benefit of which I am aware.
For myself (and as a practicing physician), I don't have a problem with it - if you like your flavored spoiled milk with extra bacteria, by all means, partake. Nearly all food is nonsterile. Much of it has quite a lot of bacteria, and most of them (Taco Bell notwithstanding) are relatively harmless. Personally, I rather prefer Pop-Tarts.
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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Actually, has anyone seen my organic ?
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
Oddly enough I happened to check the ingredients on the side of a container of Activa yoghurt and in Canada, the particular strain of probiotic bacteria has a DIN (Drug Identification Number) beside it. Due to my strobe light attention span, I didn't check it out on the Drug Product Database, but I figured it should be mentioned here. I'll probably go and follow up on that at lunch. Hey, pretty lights! (*wanders away aimlessly*)
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.
Getting filthy is part of being a kid!
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
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.
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Thanks. Now I will be unable to think about anything but the phrase "yogurt pirates" for the rest of the day.
"Yar, matey. Yo ho ho, and a packet of acidophilus."
Perhaps you should shut your yapping and do some reading.
The Soil Association.
Organic standards are the rules and regulations that define how an organic product must be made. Organic standards are laid down in European Union (EU) law. Anything labelled 'organic' that is for human consumption must meet these standards as a minimum. The standards cover all aspects of food production, for example, animal welfare and wildlife conservation, and banning unnecessary and harmful food additives in organic processed foods.
Organic farming and processing are legally defined. Any product sold as organic must comply with strict rules set at UK, European and international levels. These rules ensure that consumers can be certain that they are buying a genuine organic product. Imported organic foods must have been produced and inspected to equivalent standards. There must also be full traceabiliy of organic ingredients back to the farmer.
There a number of different certification bodies in the UK, which carry out the inspections and paperwork to ensure that the standards are being met. Soil Association Certification Limited (SA Certification) is one of only a very few of these bodies that have chosen to set standards higher than the EU minimum in areas of animal welfare and nature conservation.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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".
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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.
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!
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.
Lots of traditional foods were fermented. Nourishing Traditions (best cookbook evar!) has a couple chapters on using lacto-bacteria to predigest and preserve foods - cultured dairy products, fermented fruits & vegetables (chutney, Sauerkraut, pickled vegetables, etc), lacto-fermented beverages (made some "grape cooler" last fall - Mmmm.... ), etc.
One insight that I think is particularly useful is how the book says that grains/nuts/beans/legumes should be soaked in water (depending on what's being soaked, with salt/whey/lemon juice) to de-activate enzyme-inhibitors. This makes said grains/nuts/beans/legumes easier to digest, which might be important for you Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers... If I'm making pancakes, I take my freshly ground whole wheat flour and mix in the raw milk and a little probiotics the night before. Leave it out on the counter overnight, and by morning all those nasty enzyme inhibitors have broken down.
Sample chapters at the page linked above. Check it out. More info if desired...
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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.
I think the 'bifidus digestivus' and 'bifidus regularus' bacteria are a bunch of marketing bullshit. As noted by previous posters, they basically took some Bulgarian bacteria, renamed and trademarked it, and marketed it.
I do believe in the benefits of probiotics, although I think they are pretty low unless your body is under specific conditions that might kill all or most of the flora in your intestine. Like if you took antibiotics. Intestinal bacteria are very important, and you gotta replace it somehow if it dies off. In fact, some doctors are seriously suggesting that shit is an organ, just like your lungs and heart and whatnot. They think it is necessary for human life and if your intestinal flora is damaged, in some cases they are seriously suggesting poop transplants. Seriously, some doctors are cramming other peopless shit into their patient's colons.
So I did some poking around and i found that the Stonyfield Organic Yogurt is the best. It has 1-3 grams of fiber (depending on the flavor) in the form of inulin, which helps your body ingest the calcium. It also has 6 live cultures, which is the most of any yogurt I've seen. Combine that with the fact that it is organic, so won't be filled with hormones and (ironically) antibiotics, and a great taste (particularly the chocolate) and its a damn healthy snack.
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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 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!"
. . .not sterilize it.
.it even says 'contains live cultures' on it.
I didn't say anything about sterilizing.
. .
No, "it" doesn't.
KFG
You're not supposed to eat the stuff Dibbler sells.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The sugar in milk is lactose and it is found only in the milk of mammals.
Mammal milk you say? As opposed to what, bird milk?
The libertarian solution to the failures of capitalism is to apply more capitalism til the failures are fixed.
You are right that most yogurt packaged in a small cup with fruit flavors are diluted. However, supermarkets also carry "plain" yogurt in a pint sized container. It's mostly solid, have strong odor, and is very sour.
I once had a signature.