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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> Other functional foods are populating the dairy aisle. Danone recently introduced its Activia line of flavored yogurts enhanced with their own specially developed strain of "friendly" gut bacteria, Bifidus Regularis. The bacteria's name announces the purpose of the Activia line: To encourage frequent, on-time bowel movements.
In scientific parlance, the trip that food makes between ingestion, absorption and evacuation as waste is called "intestinal transit."
"What Danone has shown in placebo-controlled studies [with Activia] is that people who have slower intestinal transits -- maybe one bowel movement every 72 hours or more -- those people can reduce that transit time down closer to 24 to 28 hours," explained one of the nation's leading experts on bacteria-enhanced "probiotic" foods, Mary Ellen Sanders.
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Sanders, a former researcher in this area who now works as a consultant for a variety of industry and public clients -- including Danone -- noted that all yogurts contain bacteria, since these microorganisms are essential to turn milk into yogurt.
"In fact, many yogurts will have 'contains L.acidophilus' or something like that on the label, because they know there's a niche market of consumers looking for that," said Sanders, past president of the International Scientific Association for Probiotics and Prebiotics, who is based in Centennial, Colo.
However, most regular yogurts either don't contain the right strains of bacteria, or contain levels that are so low they have no real effect on human digestive physiology, Sanders said.
Activia is somewhat different, she said, because the company has tailored the yogurt around a specific strain of bacterium with known digestive potency and greatly boosted the amount available in each serving. "They've also documented that the strain does survive intestinal transit, meaning that it has effects all the way through your intestine," Sanders said.
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