Yakult why is it good for you

Instead, eating naturally fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut or kefir are much healthier and cheaper options. Coach Charuta, is a mental health professional, Kurbo coach, and active volunteer. She believes, that health and healthy habits will never come easy, but once accustomed to, can be fun and fulfilling. They were determined to find a "strong emotive brand benefit" to get the mass market buying it as often as possible.

Yet more research showed how they could lead consumers down a certain thought process to get them to buy. They worked out that "immune system" was the catch-all phrase to sum up the body's natural defences to disease. So the logic was as follows: Actimel contains friendly live bacteria called L. Imunitass note the cod Latin therefore L. Imunitass is involved with the immune system; a strong immune system means feeling healthy. The feeling healthy "hot button", as the submission puts it, was pressed when represented as freedom from fatigue and resistance to catching coughs and colds … in short, feeling good.

The ads used subliminal clues such as bad weather and people with coughs and colds to infer its "strengthen natural defences" and "helps your immune system" messages and showed supercharged women running around after drinking Actimel for two weeks to imply that it gave you energy.

At this time, while we were being first persuaded to buy into this new category of probiotics, there was no independent assessment by our regulators of whether probiotic products do what they claim.

What independent work there was had not been encouraging. The respected Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin said when it reviewed the scientific literature in and that the evidence as to whether probiotics actually work was patchy in relation to the gut and unreliable in terms of improving general wellbeing or helping with allergies. The evidence was strongest for helping those with diarrhoea caused by antibiotics or with flare-ups of inflammatory bowel disease.

People suffering from these problems might find them useful, but what the food industry needs is for as many of us as possible to believe we need to eat them as often as possible, to take them as though they were a daily dose of medicine.

I asked Danone and Yakult back in how they could justify their claims. Yakult, which markets its products as "self-defence for your gut … where the majority of your immune system is located", said it had its own independent research to support them and the fact that its bacteria survived digestion. It pointed out that Yakult is categorised as "a food for specified health use" by the Ministry of Health in Japan.

Danone said it too had done extensive research on the value of its probiotics and that various further studies were underway to show that its bacteria survived. It added that its probiotics were developed after more than 10 years of clinical research, it had conducted over 25 scientific studies on its bacteria, showing that Actimel had a measurable beneficial effect for healthy people when taken on a daily basis and was doing substantial further research.

In I asked the Food Standards Agency what advice it would give to consumers who wanted to know whether it was worth paying extra for probiotic products, but was told that it did not issue advice regarding the consumption of legally marketed foods products such as these. It had conducted laboratory tests on probiotics and found in simulated digestion that overall the addition of these bacteria did not affect the number of total bacteria in the gut and the supposedly healthy Lactobacillus bacteria — the good ones you are paying all that money to get into your digestive system — remained "subdominant" in laboratory conditions in a day experimental period.

In other words, the composition of the gut flora was not significantly changed. But, it said, these tests were to check whether probiotics were safe rather than whether they worked, since other foods eaten at the same time and what they were digested with would make a big difference. In a separate experiment, the same group of researchers examined 21 healthy volunteers.

The participants in the second study took broad spectrum antibiotics prior to ingesting probiotics. These findings suggest that probiotic consumption may actually hinder post-antibiotic gut bacteria recolonization. It is worth noting that the authors did not look into whether probiotics helped alleviate gastrointestinal symptoms, as well as other clinical outcomes. Furthermore, both studies are rather small in scale.

Definitively confirming their results would require more research. Previous studies have shown that probiotic consumption may lower the risk of certain diseases such as heart disease and cancer.

Drinks such as Yakult contain the probiotic strain Lactobacillus casei Shirota. Toggle navigation. Prevent digestive disorders such as diarrhea and constipation.

Help build immunity and reduce risk of infections. How Does Yakult Work? Nutritional Information Per 65 ml Energy 50 kcal Protein 0.