Navigating the Yogurt Aisle: What’s In Your Yogurt?

How is yogurt made, and why does it matter?

All yogurts are made by first adding two types of live active cultures to milk:

• streptococcus thermophilus
• lactobacillus bulgaricus

After the cultures are added, the milk is heated. The exception is kefir, unlike yogurt, it can be cultured at room temperature. It is important to choose a yogurt with live and active cultures to make sure you are getting the benefits from yogurt.

What are the Benefits of Yogurt?

• regularly eating yogurt can replenish beneficial bacteria in your system
• It can help create a healthy environment for digestion
• Less lactose can make it an easier dairy product to digest for people with lactose intolerance

Buyer beware: Manufacturers use tricky language.

If you’ve been reading the headlines lately, watching the news, (or even reading your healthy friend’s facebook posts!), you know that there is a lot of noise about wording on food packages, what to believe, and how food companies may be bending the truth about what’s in (or not in) their products. The same can be said about yogurts. They are not all created equal. To be sure you are getting yogurt with live cultures (which is necessary to get all the benefits from your yogurt) make sure you read the phrase “contains active cultures” or “living cultures” on the carton.

All of Stonyfield’s yogurts have living cultures added so you can be sure you’re getting all the benefits from that morning cup of yogurt. And they’re organic and made without the use of GMOs.

Author Bio

Denise Sawyer is a “Georgia peach,” born and raised. She is a part time public school educator who left full time work to be home with her two littles {ages 1 and 3} and describes blogging at Wholesome Mommy as her “night-shift job.”She has been blogging since 2008 in hopes to encourage other moms to live wholesome. What is wholesome? Denise believes everyone has to find their own balance, but she is on a mission to feed her family of four more whole foods, as many organic foods as she can afford, to use less chemicals in her home, and to squeeze in a few more minutes for snuggles.

People sometimes feel that eating well – especially organic ingredients – can be expensive and out of their reach. Denise hopes to show her readers that cooking from scratch can help you eat better AND save money. She’s on a mission to teach other young moms that cooking from scratch doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming. The family dinner hour is the most important hour of the day – from fridge to smiling faces around the table – and it should be time to enjoy good food AND each other!

You can follow Denise at Wholesome Mommy, as well as on Facebook and Twitter.