Yogurt is an ancient and well known health food. When people decide to change their diets to try and become healthier, yogurt is often the first thing that shows up at the lunchroom table. Knowing I am all about health, staff will proudly show me their yogurt containers: “Look Jeff, I’m eating yogurt!”
I try to share their excitement and not discourage them but more often than not they are displaying one of the mega brands such as Yoplait, Fred Meyer’s or Darigold. Almost without fail these mega brands are full of everything except yogurt. Yogurt is simply fermented milk. The fermentation process creates beneficial bacteria that your stomach loves. Yogurt that contains just fermented milk and perhaps straight fruit and honey can restore a stomach’s natural acid alkaline balance. Yogurt which contains anything else will lead to even more weight gain and a distressed internal environment. To save you all that label reading I have transcribed the ingredient list from a Yoplait container I retrieved from the trash at school. Yoplait contains the following:
Cultured pasteurized grade A nonfat milk, high fructose corn syrup, strawberries, modified corn starch, nonfat milk, kosher gelatin, citric acid, tricalcium phosphate, aspartame, potassium sorbate added to maintain freshness, natural flavor, red #40, vitamin A, acetate, vitamin D
The Fred Meyer’s brand contains a similar list. They list sugar instead of corn syrup and they also have something called Agar which appears to be a fairly benign thickening substance. To their credit they do include an acidophilus culture. I used to think that all the citric acid I saw in almost every juice came from a lemons, limes and oranges but it’s actually derived from corn. Not only does Yoplait contain the well known obesity culprit called corn syrup it also contains aspartame, a known carcinogen. I’m not really sure what kosher gelatin. It could be anything from horse hooves to seaweed. Let’s summarize: Yoplait contains three corn products, a known carcinogen, red dye and “kosher gelatin.”
Out here in the great Pacific Northwest the only brands I have found that are just yogurt are Nancy’s and Mountain High. Both of these contain just milk.
What I generally hear from people is that they buy these brands because Nancy’s and Mountain High don’t offer individual size containers. The mega brands usually offer a variety of flavors but their flavorings often are no healthier than the additives in fast food milkshakes. This is certainly something for the marketing people at those companies to think about but it’s faulty logic on the consumer’s part to think this is a good deal. Time, Time, Time. That’s what I hear: Packaged foods save me Time.
I had never timed it before but today I did. It took me 43 seconds to dump the better part of a small jar of fruit preserves into a gallon of yogurt, swirl it around and dump a lunch sized portion into my stainless steel stacking container lunchbox. So yes, I wasted 43 valuable seconds of my time here on the planet mixing fruit and yogurt but wait! There may be some other benefits and hidden Time savings that we cannot easily see. Because I eat a generally healthy diet and exercise frequently I don’t have to see the doctor very often. It’s hard to say how much Time this might save but I am sure it is considerable. Unlike many males of my vintage (49) I don’t waste valuable time on the commode. I don’t have to buy expensive prescriptions for cholesterol and high blood pressure. I don’t find myself spending Wednesday nights at the local weight loss support group. So I might actually be winning the Time race if I were actually interested.
Yogurt falls into the category of foods that contain beneficial pro-biotics for your innards. These foods include anything containing acidopholius and beneficial bacteria. If you think of your stomach as a garden you might get a better understanding of this. An unfertilized bare garden will sprout seeds but nothing grows very well. It needs compost and fertilizer. Think of pro-biotics as compost and fertilizer for your stomach. Adding yogurt, sauerkraut, and kimchee will make this a healthy and fertile environment. This healthy environment allows you to digest food more efficiently. When you digest food efficiently you have more energy and the rest of the systems seem to work better. So you want to eat yogurt.
Adding high fructose corn syrup and products like aspartame completely negates any beneficial aspects of the fermented milk.
I’m not sure why mega yogurt manufacturers feel the need to add all that strange stuff but they do. I don’t have time to contemplate plots and conspiracies. What I do know is that if I want to be healthy in post industrial America I have to be vigilant, I have to take the Time to read labels and become knowledgeable about what Big Food is trying to feed me.
So eat your yogurt. But try to find the real stuff. Eat a spoonful of the real stuff before every meal. Your body will appreciate it.
http://www.mountainhighyoghurt.com/
http://www.nancysyogurt.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment