By Melanie Haiken, Forbes
Worried about the risk of developing diabetes? You might want to eat more yogurt. That’s the takeaway from new research out of the University of Cambridge, which found that a significantly lower percentage of study subjects who ate yogurt at least four times a week developed diabetes than those who did not.
Eating yogurt four times a week could cut your diabetes risk, research shows (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Using data from a long-term study of the diets and health of 30,000 people in Norfolk, England, the researchers compared the diets of 753 participants who developed Type 2 diabetes over an 11-year period with 3,500 randomly selected people from the same population who remained healthy.
The study, which was published yesterday in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, analyzed study participants’ consumption of all dairy products as well as specific foods.
Like all such studies, the research documents only an association and does not prove cause and effect, cautioned lead researcher Dr. Nita Forouhi, an epidemiology group leader at the Medical Research Council at the University of Cambridge.
Nevertheless, yogurt contains calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and fatty acids, all of which have known health benefits, according to Forouhi. The fermentation process that turns milk into yogurt also produces probiotic bacteria and “specific types of vitamin K,” that are known to be beneficial.
While Forouhi and her team stopped short of identifying a mechanism for the protective effects of yogurt, it’s likely that probiotic bacteria play a key role. Recent research has pointed towards the role of gut bacteria in mediating inflammation and thus increasing or decreasing the risk of numerous diseases including colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease, as well as diabetes.
Read the full article by Melanie Haiken from Forbes.
