A study from the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that yogurt is the food that does the best job at preventing age-related weight gain. To figure out what the deal was, researchers at MIT fed a bunch of yogurt to mice to see what would happen, and when the scientists say that their results were "entertaining," you know they've come up withsomething good.
When mice go on a diet consisting of standard mouse meals supplemented with vanilla-flavored yogurt, the MIT researchers observed three changes:
- Thicker, shinier hair: Not only did yogurt mice have hair that was 10 times thicker than other mice, but measurements with cosmetic rating scales showed that their fur was "luxuriantly silky."
- A new swagger: Yogurt mice started walking funny, with a pronounced "mouse swagger," caused by the males "projecting their testes outward." And speaking of testes, yogurt mice also had…
- Larger testicles: Mice on diets supplemented with yogurt had testicles that were about 5% heavier than mice on non-yogurt diets, and 15% heavier than mice on simulated junk-food diets. Nice.
Yogurt mice didn't just sport larger knackers, they also acted on them, inseminating their partners faster (faster?) and producing more offspring than the control group of mice. And for their part, females on yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters.
The researchers are thinking that all of these benefits are due to the probiotic microbes in the yogurt, and already some continuing research at Harvard seems to show that there's a link between eating yogurt and semen quality in men that's consistent with what was seen in the mice.
Now, excuse me while I run to the grocery store real quick. To buy yogurt. Oh, it's not for me, it's for Kevin and Ray… Those poor guys need all the help they can get. LINK
Via SciAm
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