It is always nice when the foods we like turn out to be good for us. That seems to be the case this week for yogurt. We eat a lot of yogurt in this country, according to the Agricultural Marketing Resource Center, Americans consume about 12 pounds of yogurt a year, which is much less than the 63 pounds per year consumed in Sweden, but still a lot of fermented dairy product.

A British study this week showed that consuming low-fat yogurt reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by 28 percent compared to consuming no yogurt. The researchers published their results in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes).
Actually the researchers led by Dr. Nita Forouhi of the University of Cambridge found that overall consumption of dairy products did not affect the risk of type 2 diabetes, but when they looked at fermented dairy products, there was an inverse link between consumption and diabetes risk. In other words the more yogurt consumed, the lower the risk of type 2 diabetes among those studied.

“At a time when we have a lot of other evidence that consuming high amounts of certain foods, such as added sugars and sugary drinks, is bad for our health,” Forouhi said in a press release, “it is very reassuring to have messages about other foods like yogurt and low-fat fermented dairy products, that could be good for our health.”

The study analyzed a subset of 4,127 of the more than 25,000 people living in Norfolk, UK who kept food diaries as part of participating in the large EPIC-Norfolk study. This allowed the researchers to assess the risk of diabetes in relation to the consumption of total dairy product consumption and also consumption of different types of dairy products. They compared the dietary records of 753 people who developed new-onset type 2 diabetes over 11 years of follow-up, with 3,502 randomly selected study participants.

They found that while total milk and cheese intakes were not associated with diabetes risk, those with the highest consumption of low-fat fermented dairy products (such as yogurt, fromage frais (cream cheese) and low-fat cottage cheese were 24 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes over the 11 years, compared with non-consumers.

When they separated out yogurt from the other low-fat fermented dairy products, they found that those who consumed more than four 5 ounce cups of low-fat yogurt a week had a 28 per cent reduced risk of developing diabetes. (Food weights were estimated using photographs representing portion sizes.)

The researchers caution that this type of study cannot prove that eating dairy products reduces diabetes risk, but they note that dairy products do contain beneficial nutrients and yogurt contains probiotic bacteria and a special form of vitamin K associated with fermentation.

For the record, the researchers received their funding from the Medical Research Council and the Cancer Research UK, which are similar to the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society, and had no ties to the dairy industry.