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popsci_2013 01768.txt

#Eating Yogurt Does Weird Things To Your Brain Does what you eat affect your body more or your mind? Can you just chow down on Big macs as far as the brain goes and be pretty much set? Or is there a deeper connection between thinking and food? A new UCLA study that's one part gross to three parts fascinating has an idea: gut bacteria. Animals have been shown to have altered their minds by gut bacteria--is it the same for humans? Yogurt contains probiotics a kind of good gut bacteria that may have health benefits. Researchers wanted to test out the relationship between probiotics and brain function so they took three groups of 12 women each and fed one of the groups (the lucky group) yogurt with probiotics one group a yogurt-like dairy product and one group nothing. The idea was to show that what happens in humans'guts directly affects their brains. During the study the yogurt group got the probiotic goodness twice a day every day for four weeks. Before and after that four-week session all 36 women in the study got fmri scans. In both fmri sessions the women had scanned their brains at rest and during emotion-recognition task: in this case they were shown frightened or angry faces and told to match the emotions to other frightened or angry faces. Which sounds stressful. Perhaps yogurt could help. Tasks like that are a measurement of activity in certain brain regions and similar links have been found between gut changes and emotion recognition in animals so this was a test to see if the process extended to humans. Turns out it did but not necessarily in the positive way you'd anticipate with a healthy food like yogurt: during the task the women who ate the real yogurt actually had decreased activity in the part of the brain that regulates body sensations. But in the resting brain scan the women also showed increased connectivity in the periaqueductal gray region and the prefrontal cortex which affects cognition. So what's yogurt doing to your brain? Hard to say. It's a small sample size and the data doesn't seem to lead to a concrete conclusion about how the bacteria will affect thinking. But the researchers say this was more of a study to see if some kind of relationship existed between the bacteria and thought which they say they did find. It's more of an open question now how that relationship affects how much yogurt you'll want to stock up on. I can't imagine that the group of women who didn't eat anything for 4 weeks did very well. Was this yogurt also mixed with much sugar? If it did have much sugar and not yogurt alone then even this preliminary test is corrupted and beside 36 people is really tiny test group too. I think the only major difference would have been the bacteria content. Amount of sugar should not affect the results so long as it remains constant in all groups. A study set for inconclusive results: 2 portions yoghurt a day is just a small percentage of your total diet. So other nutrients in each woman diet can cloud results; Other studies have shown that eating probiotics has a negligible effect on good gut bacteria. This is due to the fact that the numbers of gut bateria are far greater then the relatively small numbers in the probiotic yoghurt; On top of the above a tiny sample of 3x 12 woman. Instead of yoghurt why not reduce the number of variables and just give them straight probiotic pills? Also keep track of before and after bacteria colonization of the intestines to see if they're actually there. I think every type of food affects a person one way or another. No!!!I eat Yoghurt to calm my stomach. And I've always thought yoghurt is exempted from having undesirable effects. So what does this mean: decreased activity in the part of the brain that regulates body sensations. But in the resting brain scan the women also showed increased connectivity in the periaqueductal gray region and the prefrontal cortex which affects cognitionalcohol has an effect sort of like that it's cultured some say it's good for you. I don't see a conclusive presentation. probiotic goodness & the lucky ones sounds like comercial propaganda disguised as lab results to evoke existing popular beliefs about yoghurt and amplify awareness (sales). probably ok though if you're not dairy intolerant (many are. Im not used to eat yugurt i feel vomit everytime i tasted it...yogurt is most likely for diet purposes not a usual consumption.<<a href=http://getmysocial. org/buy-twitter-followers/>gain more twitter followers</a a

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