Evidence has been building about the health benefits of probiotics. Now, new research has found that putting a tablespoon of honey on your yogurt helps the probiotics it contains to survive in the gut. It’s a win-win combination that’s both healthy and delicious.
Humans love to ferment food and drinks – think kimchi, and – and we’ve been doing it for . Yogurt is a fermented favorite. Conventional yogurts are produced by fermenting milk using a standard ‘starter culture’ of and bacterial species; probiotic yogurts supplement the starter culture with probiotic strains such as .
There’s growing evidence that consuming probiotics positively affects and gut health. Given that honey is commonly added to yogurt, a source of probiotics, researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign examined the effect that adding honey to yogurt had on the gut microbiome across two studies. “We were interested in the culinary pairing of yogurt and honey, which is common in the Mediterranean diet, and how it impacts the gastrointestinal microbiome,” said Hannah Holscher, associate professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, part of the College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at the University of Illinois, and the corresponding author of both studies.
In the first study, the researchers examined whether adding one of four varieties of honey – alfalfa, buckwheat, clover, and orange blossom – to a commercial yogurt (Ac.