Ladies, if that Super Bowl Sunday pitch from '90s heart throb John Stamos didn't leave you craving more yogurt, here's some science that might do the trick: There's tantalizing new research suggesting that some friendly bacteria commonly found in yogurts may help women shed more weight while on a diet and keep it off.
The findings, published recently in the British Journal of Nutrition, also hint at how probiotics — live cultures of supposedly beneficial microbes — in our food might be interacting with the tiny microbes that live in our guts, which may play a role in the obesity epidemic.
In the study, researchers from Universite Laval in Quebec, Canada, and yogurt giant Nestle recruited 125 obese but otherwise healthy men and women for a 24-week-long study. For the first 12 weeks, all of the subjects were put on a supervised, calorie-restricted weight-loss diet. The second 12 weeks were a weight maintenance period: Participants got a personalized diet plan but no more calorie restrictions.
During the entire 24-week period, half the study subjects got two pills a day containing a probiotic known as Lactobacillus rhamnosus. Each pill contained roughly the same amount of this bacteria as you would get in a single serving of yogurt. The other half received placebo pills.
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