Eat yogurt 'appetizer' to cut down inflammation risk
18 May 2018 4:32 PM GMT
Relishing yogurt as an "appetizer" may help reduce chronic inflammation – a key factor associated with bowel disease, arthritis and asthma as well as cardiometabolic diseases, finds a study.
The findings showed that yogurt may help reduce inflammation by improving the integrity of the intestinal lining, thus preventing endotoxins – pro-inflammatory molecules produced by gut microbes – from crossing into the blood stream.
"Eating eight ounces of low-fat yogurt before a meal is a feasible strategy to improve post-meal metabolism and thus may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases," said Ruisong Pei, postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.
For the new study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, the team enrolled 120 pre menopausal women, half obese and half non-obese. Half of the participants were assigned to eat 12 ounces of low-fat yogurt every day for nine weeks; a control group ate non-dairy pudding for nine weeks. The participants were also involved in a high-calorie meal challenge at the beginning and end of their nine-week dietary intervention. For both challenges, blood work showed that the yogurt "appetizer" helped improve some key biomarkers of endotoxin exposure and inflammation as participants digested the meal over the ensuing
hours.
Next Story
