“Yogurt consumption is associated with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD)”  is one of the 10 evidence-based conclusions made by the YINI board about the health effects of yogurt… learn more below

The association between yogurt consumption and reduced risk of CVD may be due to the protective properties of some components.

• Yogurt and other dairy products are rich in micronutrients and proteins, some of which have been shown to lower blood pressure.
• Low-grade inflammation underlies the pathology of CVD, and some saturated fatty acids found in antiinflammatory effects.
• Calcium, potassium and magnesium found in yogurt have been linked to a reduced risk of stroke.
• Milk proteins may have a beneficial effect on blood lipids.
• The dairy matrix may contribute to the beneficial effects of yogurt and other dairy products and determine the fat bioavailability.

In addition, cheese and fermented milk products such as probiotic yogurts and semi-skimmed yogurts in particular have a high antioxidant potential i.e. the ability to combat oxidative damage, and could play a part in healthy and active ageing.

Whole-fat or low-fat dairy products?

Although nutritional guidelines recommend consumption of low-fat rather than whole-fat dairy foods to reduce CVD, recent findings suggest that this advice may need to be modified.
A review of meta-analyses has found that the consumption of various forms of dairy products – including total dairy, cheese, yogurt, high-fat and low-fat dairy – shows either favourable or neutral associations with cardiovascular-related outcomes.
Researchers conclude that the current scientific evidence calls into question the negative image of milk fat, and that consumers can continue to consume full-fat dairy products moderately as part of a healthy and balanced lifestyle, with fermented dairy products being preferable for optimum nutrient intake and potential cardiovascular health benefits

References:

• Givens DI. Saturated fats, dairy foods and health: a curious paradox? Nutrition Bulletin 2017;42:274–82. 
• Guo J, Astrup A, Lovegrove JA, et al. Milk and dairy consumption and risk of cardiovascular diseases and all-cause mortality: dose-response meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies. Eur J Epidemiol 2017;32:269–87.
• Lordan R, Tsoupras A, Mitra B, et al. Dairy fats and cardiovascular disease: do we really need to be concerned? Foods 2018;7:29.
• Fardet A, Rock E. In vitro and in vivo antioxidant potential of milks, yoghurts, fermented milks and cheeses: a narrative review of evidence. Nutr Res Rev 2017; Oct 2:1–19.
• Astrup A. Yogurt and dairy product consumption to prevent cardiometabolic diseases: epidemiologic and experimental studies. Am J Clin Nutr 2014;99(5 Suppl):1235S–42S.

Since the beginning of December 2018, the Cité des Sciences – the French museum for discovery and scientific culture – is hosting a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the gut microbiota. We visited the exhibition and tell you in this article what we saw there. If you have the chance to be in Paris before August 4th 2019, we strongly advise you to go there !

A paedagogical approach to the gut microbiota

When entering the prestigious Cité des Sciences’ hall, visitors are welcome by a huge poster, which reads : MICROBIOTE. The exhibition is an adaptation of Giulia Enders’ best seller ‘Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ’, and is an exploration of our microscopic inner life. So the show is built around different topics :

• human physiology of the intestinal tract (role of the gut, gut-brain axis, area covered by the gut…)
• stool samples and basic toilet education
• gut health (role of the gut microbiota, difference between lactose intolerance and cow’s milk allergy…)
• microbial diversity in the gut and their study (data about gut microbes, friends and foes, metagenomics…)
• how to favor a healthy gut with diet (prebiotics, probiotics, fermented foods benefits…)

Welcome to a world where the unknown becomes your own !

The visit starts with giant mouth, a gate to enter and discover the world within each and everyone of us. As of this moment, we step into the gut and discover a first room. A huge installation shows how the intestinal tract connects and exchanges information with our brain (for more information you can read our article about yogurt and the risk of depression, as well as possible benefits of fermentation).

All along the way, signs written in English, French and Spanish, give indications on what visitors see. At this stage of the visit, it highlights the idea that the gut microbiota constitutes an unknown organ of our body, which contributes to the healthy functioning of our organism.

The gut is huge and misunderstood !

Next, visitors enter what could easily be called the practical room ! The Bristol stool scale (or how to interpret your stool by its shape : kids laughing out loud !), an installation with a toilet showing how to best evacuate the bowels (also a kids’ major hit !), and a human model with a rope coming out of his belly to illustrate how long the gut is : a hands on and fun way to expose gut facts with humor and playfulness !

An interactive screen at the end of the room gives detailed information about common gut allergies to wheat, peanuts or milk. For the latter, the presentation makes a clear distinction between lactose intolerance and cow’s milk allergy, and explores the differences between the two phenomena (see our article on the subject). It reminds visitors that those who suffer from lactose intolerance are encouraged to keep on consuming dairy products such as yogurt and find for themselves the amounts they can easily tolerate (for more information on yogurt, lactose intolerance and maldigestion, read our dedicated questions and answers section).

Meeting our microbial friends

The third room of the exhibition is our first encounter with the gut microbiota per se. We learn that the gut is home to billions of exotic organisms : bacteria, yeasts, archaea, and viruses. Together this inner life forms what we call the gut microbiota, a huge variety of species and families. These tiny companions are very active and can impact our weight, our allergies, our immune system, as well as our behaviour and mood.

The paedagocial material starts by putting forward the key advances made by research in the past decade. Installations thus show the complexity awaiting researchers who seek to understand this lively envrionment : a lab with mice study, an anaerobic chamber, posters explaining basic principles of microbiology and more advanced explanations about techniques such as metagenomics.

The main challenge to analyze the gut microbiota is that most gut bacteria do not tolerate oxygen, which makes it impossible to study them under normal lab conditions. The recent technological advances in high throughput sequencing has made it possible to meet our microbial friends.

Let’s all take care of our gut microbiota

The exhibition ends with two interactive screens. The first enables visitors to hear the testimonies of microbes about their work inside us or their actions for our benefit such as fermentation. Visitors can thus listen to Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus & Streptococcus thermophiles explain how they produce yogurt (for more information on this topic, read our article “what is yogurt ?“).

A final interactive screen leaves the visitors with a few pieces of advice on how to take care of their gut microbiota. Firstly, feeding our microbiota with certain types of fibers, also called prebiotics, is a great way to help the good bacteria flourish. These are found in vegetables, whole grains, and starchy foods after they have been in the fridge. Secondly, the presentation explains that visitors can reinforce the diversity of the gut microbiota by regularly consuming live bacteria, which are beneficial for health, these are called probiotics. Mankind has been aware of these benefits : there are numerous examples worldwide of fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, or yogurt (for more information about fermented foods, probiotics and fermentation benefits, read our article “which fermented foods contain the most ‘friendly’ bacteria“).

Understanding the gut microbiota, understanding our health

The “microbiote” exhibition at the Cité des Sciences is a great way to pass on facts about the gut microbiota, a topic, which has only recently come to the public’s attention. Visitors leave with a good grasp on what our microbial friends do for us and the ways to take care of them with healthy eating habits, such as including prebiotics and probiotics in our regular diet.

As the exhibition concludes, the most striking about the gut microbiota is that we come to realize that there are more bacterial cells than human cells in our body. So the more we understand about the gut microbiota, the more we will be able to understand our health.

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Practical information

• “Microbiote” is an exhibition by the Cité des Sciences in Paris and will last until August 4h, 2019
• The complete visit takes two hours
• Giulia Enders’ best seller ‘Gut : The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ‘
• Let us know what you thought about the exhibition on Twitter

Children and teenagers could benefit too

• Among US children and teenagers, those who eat yogurt have a lower intake of saturated fat than non-consumers.7
• In European adolescents, consumption of milk and yogurt has been found to be inversely associated with being overweight and positively associated with cardiorespiratory fitness.48,78
• Dairy consumption was found to be inversely associated with CVD risk score in girls.78

“There’s an inverse association between yogurt consumption and a composite cardiovascular risk factors score.” – Professor Luis Moreno

References:

• Keast DR, Hill Gallant KM, Albertson AM, et al. Associations between yogurt, dairy, calcium, and vitamin D intake and obesity among U.S. children aged 8–18 years: NHANES, 2005–2008. Nutrients 2015;7:1577–93.
• Moreno LA, Bel-Serrat S, Santaliestra-Pasías A, et al. Dairy products, yogurt consumption, and cardiometabolic risk in children and adolescents. Nutr Rev 2015;73(Suppl 1):8–14.
• Bel-Serrat S, Mouratidou T, Jiménez-Pavón D, et al. Is dairy consumption associated with low cardiovascular disease risk in European adolescents? Results from the HELENA Study. Pediatr Obes 2014;9:401–10.

When you’re “eating for two”, it’s easy to start piling on too many pounds and after your baby is born finding yourself a few sizes larger than you were pre-pregnancy. It may be more serious than you think – too much weight gain in pregnancy can put you and your baby at risk of a multitude of potential complications.

But now a study from China suggests that eating a variety of foods including fish, beans, nuts and yogurt is associated with maintaining a healthy weight gain during pregnancy and this may help protect you and your baby.

A healthy weight gain is vital for a good pregnancy outcome

When you’re pregnant, you need to put on just the right amount of weight. Too little weight gain and the baby may not grow properly in the womb, and there’s a greater risk of premature birth. To much weight gain and you’re vulnerable to a raft of complications in pregnancy, including gestational diabetes, raised blood pressure, and blood clots, as well as increasing the chances of needing a caesarean delivery, and long-term effects on the health of the infant.

That’s why it’s important to get your diet right during pregnancy. In Western populations, unhealthy diets – too much fast food or too few vegetables – have been linked to excessive weight gain during pregnancy.

Which diets achieve the healthiest weight gain in pregnancy?

The latest study looked at whether similar relationships occur between dietary patterns and weight gain during pregnancy among women in China, where dietary habits tend to differ from those of Western populations.

The authors examined data from 5,733 pregnant women taking part in a study in Guangzhou in southern China. Here the typical diet is largely based on rice and soup and this diet was used as the reference diet against which other dietary patterns were compared.

The authors identified six such dietary patterns based on how often the participants ate certain foods, as shown by their food frequency questionnaires:

1. ‘richer in cereals’ – the reference group
2. ‘richer in vegetables’
3. ‘richer in meats’
4. ‘richer in fruits’
5. ‘richer in fish, beans, nuts, and yogurt’
6. ‘richer in milk and milk powder.’

A fruit-rich diet was associated with greater weight gain

‘Consuming a variety of foods and frequent consumption of fruits during pregnancy contributes to a more rapid increase in GWG [gestational weight gain] among pregnant women in China. Findings may be useful in pregnancy weight monitoring.’ – Wei X et al, 2019.

Compared with the reference group, those women who followed the ‘richer in fruits’ dietary pattern put on more weight during pregnancy, and at a faster rate.

As fruits are packed full of vitamins, minerals, fibre, and antioxidants, a diet rich in fruit can be expected to offer health benefits to both mother and baby. But the study also revealed a small association of the fruit-rich diet with excessive weight gain during pregnancy – a finding that isn’t in line with previous studies.

The explanation might lie in the fact that certain fruits such as dried dates and watermelon contain large amounts of simple sugars – glucose, fructose, sucrose – which are related to overweight or obesity. It could be that low-sugar fruits are more suitable during pregnancy, and this possibility warrants further study, say the authors.

A varied diet including yogurt was associated with healthy weight gain

The diet containing a variety of foods – ‘richer in fish, beans, nuts and yogurt’ – was associated with a faster weight gain in the second trimester of pregnancy. It was also associated with a reduced risk of inadequate weigh gain, but not excessive weigh gain in this study.

This positive effect could be because women following this kind of diet are likely to lead healthy lifestyles that contribute to a healthy weight gain in pregnancy, explain the authors. Frequently eating a variety of foods provides a flow of essential nutrients and further contributes to healthy weight gain, they add.

‘The richer in fish, beans, nuts and yogurt pattern was related to a reduced risk for inadequate GWG but not excessive GWG, among Chinese pregnant women.’ – Wei X et al, 2019.

Vegetable- and meat-rich diets were not linked to weight gain in pregnancy

The other dietary patterns – those richer in vegetables, meats or milk and milk powder – were not independently associated with weight gain or rate of weight gain in pregnant women in this study.

The authors conclude that eating a varied diet should be promoted and recommended in dietary guideline in China for managing weight during pregnancy.

Find out more: read the original article.

Source: Wei X, He JR, Lin Y, et al. The influence of maternal dietary patterns on gestational weight gain: A large prospective cohort study in China. Nutrition. 2019 Mar;59:90-95.