Is Yogurt Really A Good Probiotic?
Why only real yogurt is a good probiotic
Marketing is a powerful tool. It has led to a surge in yogurt sales, all for the probiotic benefits. Are these benefits true or just marketing? Let’s discuss this. I wrote about yogurt five or six years ago. It is still relevant today. The following is from my Probiotic Oral Health book, available on Amazon. I now also have an author page on Amazon. This is where my books will be all in one place. Please share with friends and family: https://www.amazon.com/author/ericglancaster
Liquid probiotics come in different media. Many are in a milk-based media, requiring refrigeration. The product has not been fermented unless it has a very sour taste. In other words, a non-fermented food. Fermentation is a process without air where the microbes can eat the sugars (carbohydrates) in a formula and produce metabolites or beneficial waste products (discussed below). It is a common practice to make certain foods. Almost all commercially available yogurts fall into this category of non-fermented products. Traditional yogurt is fermented overnight in a warmer, over several hours so that microbes can eat and digest the milk sugars, breaking them down into smaller molecules. They do this all while producing various metabolites. Homemade yogurt is sour due to the lactic acid bacteria producing lactic acid and acetic acid (very mild acids) during fermentation. The next time you are at a grocery store, look at the nutritional label and see how much sugar is in the yogurt you like. Chances are it has thirty or more grams of sugar. If it were fermented, this would be impossible. It would have less than ten grams after fermentation. Most of today’s yogurts are made in the following way: Milk is mixed with sugar and with something that causes it to thicken, like vinegar/citric or acetic acid. Then freeze-dried cultures are added and put at a low temperature to prevent fermentation. Think of it. If it were fermented, the yogurt containers would all be popping open from the pressure of the microbes fermenting. This explains why yogurt is not a good source of probiotics. You are better off with good quality sauerkraut or kimchi for probiotics than most yogurt on a store shelf.
Finally, some of those other liquid probiotics are milk-based, which is why they are in the refrigerator, and they claim high colony counts to get you to buy them. The truth is those products only have one strain or a few strains from the same genus. Remember what we said before? Many microbes from the same genus do similar things. Look for something that has several varieties (genera), does not require refrigeration (shelf stable), is fermented, is liquid, and is sour. And all of these fermented foods you can make at home.
So, why aren’t these ideal probiotics? With yogurt, the microbes have not had a chance to predigest the mild sugars, and most yogurt companies add more sugar to make the “yogurt” more palatable. We have an addiction to sugar and need everything sweet, even foods that are supposed to be sour. Freeze-dried microbes are mostly dead. Only about 5% of the total number of microbes survive the freeze-drying process, decreasing their potential efficacy. The remaining microbes that survived need a minimum of 8 hours to reanimate. If you consumed this freeze-dried product, it would be in your small intestine by the time it is reanimated. In the body, these low populations of microbes would have to compete with the other dominant species in your gut. Let’s assume that all 5% survived the small intestines (anywhere from 40 minutes to 2 hours have passed), and they go into the large intestines. They will have another set of microbes to contend with and will start to repopulate. For the average person, the food is in the large intestines for 36 hours. This means the microbes, assuming they survived, have had about 38 hours to react and interact with the microbes in the gut.
Some live, active bacteria can reproduce in as little as 30 minutes. Many bacteria take anywhere from four minutes to twenty minutes to reproduce. Using the scenario above with an average of twelve minutes for reproduction, this means that the microbes would have reproduced 190 times in 38 hours. Let’s say there were supposedly 5 billion cfu/ml in that serving of yogurt, and 5% survived. That would mean that we started with 250,000,000 cfu/ml. By the time you had a bowel movement, those populations would have increased to 47,500,000,000 cfu/ml. Sounds crazy, but if you were to take a live, mixed culture of probiotics in your mouth, that would add sixteen more hours of reproduction time. Suppose the product claims 5 billion cfu/ml of live microbes. By the time it reaches the small intestine (6 to 8 hours), the populations will be 200,000,000,000 cfu/ml and 38,000,000,000,000 cfu/ml by the time they leave. I used simple multiplication instead of compounding formulas to keep it simple. I also assumed all of the microbes survived. Without that, it is clear that taking a live, active microbial formula will result in dramatically higher populations of probiotic microbes. This is why I have always recommended these types of products over freeze-dried products.
Have you taken your probiotics today?