Today’s flavored yogurt production has changed all that in terms of what the food offers biologically. Instead of using fermented milk, the food manufacturing industry produces a heavily processed product loaded with ingredients that negate any health benefits one expects to derive from eating such products. It makes a lot of sense to stop eating flavored yogurt in order to make significant gains in improving your overall wellness.
Extremely High Amount of Added “Free” Sugars
Compared to their natural counterparts, flavored yogurts often contain almost double the amount of sugar in general. The results of a cross-sectional study carried out on multiple countries and published by Current Developments in Nutrition in 2019 revealed that flavored yogurt contained about 11.5 grams of sugar per 100 grams and had an equally significant amount of “free” sugars.
Raises Glucose Levels and Insulin Production
According to an article from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on the nutritional source analysis, this is due to a lack of fiber content, which leads to immediate absorption of the fruit through the intestines, causing high blood glucose spikes accompanied by increased insulin production.
Artificial Sweeteners Cause Gut Dysbiosis
In order to promote a yogurt product as “low-calorie,” companies introduce artificial sweeteners into the products instead of sugar, namely, saccharin and sucralose. One of the breakthrough studies that proved this effect was carried out by Nature, and its findings were later updated by experts at News-Medical Life Sciences.
Worsening Pre-Existing Gastrointestinal Disorders
The emulsifiers combined with the high fructose levels within the fruit-flavored yogurts will contribute to flare-ups of their symptoms. This is proven by a double-blind experiment on humans presented in Nutrition and Healthy Aging in 2017 under the title “Effect of Carrageenan on Remission of Ulcerative Colitis.”
Inhibition of Protein Digestion in the Stomach
The whey or casein proteins found in flavored yogurt products may interfere with normal gastric juices in humans. In vitro human gastric digestion assays reported in Biomacromolecules revealed that these cosmetic ingredients greatly reduce the efficiency of pepsin, thereby interfering with protein digestion to smaller peptides in your body.
Lower Efficiency of Probiotics
The highly acidic nature of commercially available fruits may negatively affect the efficiency of live strains after some time on the shelf. Survival rates of probiotic strains were compared in the Journal of Dairy Science, revealing that plain yogurt is a more favorable growth medium for Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus CFU counts at consumption time.
Misleading Labeling of Fat-Free Products
Removal of fat from yogurts for the purpose of marketing it as “0% Fat” makes the product unappealing to consumers. However, as shown by the studies analyzing low-fat dairy content changes featured in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, to compensate for the loss of fats, manufacturers add excessive amounts of modified corn starch, gums, and sugar to yogurts.
Masking of Inferior Quality Milk Bases
Due to the intense flavoring characteristics of artificial berries or citrus products, food manufacturers can employ inferior quality milk bases for their processing purposes. In this regard, according to the technical descriptions of industrial processes in the International Journal of Dairy Technology, these concentrated artificial flavors can effectively hide the loss of freshness or stability in the milk bases.
