As a healthy life endorser, beside abstaining or at least tryin from MSG (Mono sodium Glutamate), refined sugar, artificial sweetener and Transfat, healthy foods are on top list. One of them is yogurt.
As i recall, the first time I get in touch with yogurt is when I was in primary school, yogurt was alien, rare and even luxury. The first time I try to eat that, ow, so sour. Back then, it was given by one of my relative in a liter white plastic bottle with a goat label on it. Can’t remember the brand. Maybe it was a fermented goat milk that known as kefir.
After I grown up, yogurt is on my top list of my favorite food or drink since it has sour and refreshing taste with smooth texture. More over, it has many good benefit. But alas, the price is not cheap, it took more than fresh milk and fresh milk is not cheap either.
At first I still don’t aware why yogurt more healthy compared to milk. Because it’s sour taste? Or it’s like Tempe that has more nutrition than soybean because it’s fermented? But that’s not it. Yogurts are made from milk thanks to the hard work of the bacterias which has bad stereotype and image. The bacterias are not any ordinary bacterias, these bacterias are the good one that have benefit to our digestion. These bacterias can suppress “bad” bacterias in our digestion system which may enter from “dirty” foods. These good bacterias synthesize vitamins in our colon too.
Sound trivial, but digestion system tightly related with overall health. When you have constipation, waste of the body will rot inside and causing poisons. These poisons will absorbed back to the body and ruin overall health.
Why yogurt has sour taste? The good bacterias that cultivated in milk will digest some sort of sugar in the milk that knows as lactose and have Lactic Acid as it’s result. That’s why it has sour taste. Some of us have allergy to milk (lactose to be precise), therefore yogurts are more friendly for digestion for these people since the lactose are transformed into lactic acid. But still, it’s depend how “intolerant” to lactose you are. It’s better to try it progressively.
The main idea here is the bacterias. What we want is to get the good bacterias inside our digestion system to suppress “bad” bacterias. With this guide, we need to be more picky and mindful when we choose yogurts since not all yogurts have “live” cultures in it. Most of the products are heat treated to expand shelf life which we don’t want products like that, no live cultures in it.
Those kind of yogurts are just tasty treat without digestion supporting benefit. It’s just a nutrition pack food or drink (like milk does). Yogurts with live cultures have short shelf life and must be stored in refrigerator, not on regular shelf.
For alternatives, there are some products out there that contain live pro biotic bacterias packaged in small bottles. But when we peek on the ingredients list, the sugar inside a small bottle are more than sugar contained inside a regular yogurt pack. You got pro biotic but you increase your sugar intake at the same time.
Next, yogurts came in vary packages. There are yogurt drinks that thin, runny and watery compared to original yogurts. They cost more and contain more sugar than regular yogurt pack. In my opinion, value-per-price for yogurt drinks are lower from benefit point of view.
If you look for healthy snacks, yogurt deserve to take into account. But take note that it has to contains life culture and the sugar are moderate.
