The Food Programme – Beetroot and Health Legislation

What are prebiotics?  Find out on the probiotics, prebiotics and intestinal flora page.

I like yogurt. But do probiotics – those “friendly” bacteria in yogurt and increasingly added to other foods – do anything for you beyond making yogurt taste good? I wrote about probiotics in What to Eat at some length. Tara Parker-Pope has a quick summary of the state of the research in today’s New York Times.

The quick answer is mixed. It includes a lot of “maybe” or “probably,” always a sign that whatever probiotics might do isn’t going to be much. The answer is probably yes for infant diarrhea and, maybe, irritable bowel syndrome, and maybe or no for just about everything else.

In the absence of FDA action to regulate misleading health claims, lawyers have jumped into the breach. They have just won a large class-action settlement – $35 million – against Dannon for claiming that Activia yogurt promotes immunity. According to one news account, Dannon spent $100 million marketing the immunity-promoting effects of Activia ignoring the results of its own company-sponsored research which inconveniently showed few benefits. (Did they not pay enough for the research?).

Read the full article : Health claims for yogurt? Really?

This is the sort of yoghurt whose advertisement features middle-class women drinking coffee from a cafetiere and complaining in a sharing sort of way that they feel bloated all the time. Now, I know that this feeling of bloatedness comes from living like a lobotomised, over-propertied seal at the end of history rather than from not eating enough yoghurt, but I suppose they had to flog it somehow. It’s probably full of sugar and poison anyway, but it’s got a green label so it must be better than that pink-packaged petit filou stuff that really posh children like to eat with tiny spoons, the sort used to bash in the brains of cooked quails or something.

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A TV advert which asserted that Actimel yogurt supported children’s natural defences against disease has been banned by the advertising watchdog.

The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that claims that it could help protect school-age youngsters against illness were not supported by evidence.

Full story