Why is plain yogurt considered good for digestion? What’s it doing down there?

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Why is plain yogurt considered good for digestion? What’s it doing down there?

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6 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your stomach contains helpful bacteria, which help break down foods that would otherwise be indigestible.
Yogurt happens to naturally contain some of those helpful bacteria, which are called cultures.

Eating the yogurt puts the good bacteria from the yogurt into your stomach, where it can help break down foods that you can’t.

This is why people who are on antibiotics are supposed to eat yogurt; taking antibiotics hurts the good bacteria in your stomach, and eating cultured yogurt helps replenish them.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s friendly bacteria living in your large intestine. They’re supposed to help you break down the parts of food you normally couldn’t, help you make vitamin K, and occupy all the space in there so nothing new can infect you. But if some of them die off from too much exposure to antibiotics or you eating the wrong foods for a long time, bad bacteria can move in and start making poisons that make you sick.

Plain yogurt has live bacteria in it. They’re a variety that won’t try to poison you if they set up shop in your large intestine. So if you’re at risk for bad bacteria moving in, eating a lot of yogurt can crowd them out.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Okay, imagine your stomach is a big, muscular bag that can break down food into tiny pieces. Sometimes, the food you eat can be a little tough, or it might have some germs on it that your stomach needs to get rid of. That’s where the good bacteria in plain yogurt come in!

Good bacteria also called “probiotics,” are tiny living organisms that live in your digestive system and help your body break down food and keep out harmful bacteria. When you eat plain yogurt, the probiotics make their way down to your stomach and start working their magic. They help break down the food you’ve eaten, and they also help keep your gut healthy by fighting off any harmful bacteria that might be lurking in there.

So, in short, plain yogurt is good for your digestion because it contains probiotics that help your body break down food and keep your stomach healthy. And that’s why it’s considered healthy food to eat!

Anonymous 0 Comments

Answer: yogurt and some other fermented foods contain “good” bacteria called probiotics which might have beneficial health benefits for some people. Possible benefits range from “gut health”, “diarrhea prevention”, possibly boosting mood and cognitive functions among the other benefits.

A good summary of the current state:

https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/probiotics-what-you-need-to-know

A great deal of research has been done on probiotics, but much remains to be learned about whether they’re helpful and safe for various health conditions.

Probiotics have shown promise for a variety of health purposes, including prevention of antibiotic-associated diarrhea (including diarrhea caused by Clostridium difficile), prevention of necrotizing enterocolitis and sepsis in premature infants, treatment of infant colic, treatment of periodontal disease, and induction or maintenance of remission in ulcerative colitis.

However, in most instances, we still don’t know which probiotics are helpful and which are not. We also don’t know how much of the probiotic people would have to take or who would be most likely to benefit. Even for the conditions that have been studied the most, researchers are still working toward finding the answers to these questions.

Other good links that detail the current state of research:

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/probiotics-online/

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Probiotics-Consumer/

https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Probiotics-HealthProfessional/

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/probiotics-may-help-boost-mood-and-cognitive-function

Anonymous 0 Comments

As I understand it, there are bacteria in the yogurt that bring diversity to your gut microbiome. It’s not special to yogurt, other fermented foods have them too like sauerkraut and so on. You have to make sure they’re not pasteurized (heated to kill bacteria). You can also ferment food yourself extremely easily, you probably already have everything you need.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Your digestive system has a microbiome of bacteria, the plain yogurt basically is nutrition for that microbiome, thus “improving digestion”