What makes yogurt a healthy snack?
It’s packed with nutrients!
Yogurt provides more than just calcium. Most 8 ounce/225g servings in US and 140g in EU are sources of calcium, phosphorus, and riboflavin, and provide smaller but valuable amounts of a range of other micronutrients.
Figure 2: Nutrient content of a pot of low-fat fruit yogurt from McCance and Widdowson’s Composition of Foods Integrated Dataset (42)
Can yogurt affect your “brain power”?
In a study some years ago comparing the impact of a yogurt snack to a diet soft drink on cognitive performance, the yogurt snack improved the subjects’ capacity to solve arithmetic problems, and less time was needed to solve these problems (43). Additional studies need to be done to build on this research.
Yogurt and health
A recent study by Zhu and colleagues (44) reported that frequent yogurt consumption (once per week) was associated with better diet quality and insulin sensitivity in children compared to infrequent consumers. Wang et al (45) found that yogurt consumption in adults was associated with lower levels of circulating triglycerides and glucose, lower systolic blood pressure, lower insulin resistance and a healthier diet pattern compared to non-consumers.
Quality counts
Milk and yogurt are excellent sources of high quality protein (contain all 9 essential amino acids in the proportions that cells need for protein synthesis). The protein content of yogurt is generally higher than that of milk because of the addition of non-fat dry milk during yogurt production. Further, when natural yogurt is strained, it is higher in protein weight for weight compared to non-strained yogurt. Proteins in yogurt have been found to be more digestible than proteins in unfermented (standard) milk. (46)
