Stuff You Should Know - Is yogurt a miracle food?

Episode Date: November 8, 2018

Yogurt has been touted as a health food, but is it? Maybe. If you eat it every day. We get into the rich and creamy history of this supposed miracle food in today's episode. Take a listen! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W, Chuck Bryant, and Jerry, and this is the smooth, creamy, tangy edition of Stuff You Should Know. Fruit on the bottom. You don't like yogurt or fruit on the bottom yogurt? I don't like fruit on the bottom. Oh, okay. But you do like yogurt?

Yeah, I don't like any of the fruity ones. I mean, they taste fine, but I think they're just like loaded with sugar generally in sweeteners and things. Well, yeah, it's not fruit, it's like jam on the bottom, jelly, you know? Do you like yogurt? Compote. Yeah, I love yogurt. As a matter of fact, while we were researching this, I was like, I can't, I can't stand it

any longer. I got up and got some yogurt. Do you eat it regularly? Not as much as I should, although I recently did a blood test and my protein was low strangely, so I'm going to start eating more. Okay. What? I was just curious.

You sounded like, yeah, I'll believe that when I see it. No, no, no. I was just curious what your yogurt intake was. What about you? You eat it every day? No, I should. Like, I don't eat yogurt much. I'm constantly slapping it on my kid's baby plate, and she loves it, and Emily eats it,

and I'm like, I need to eat more yogurt. I mean, I like it. I just don't think about it much. What I do is sometimes in a hotel or anywhere where they have the sort of build your own parfait thing, though a little granola or granula in there, maybe a little bit of fresh fruit and mix that all up, and I love it. And I'm like, I should do this every day, because as we will find out, the benefits of eating yogurt, which are sort of up in the air as far as hard facts, but it seems

like sort of regularly eating yogurt is kind of one of the keys to getting the health benefits. That seems to be generally agreed upon. And not like, oh, I ate yogurt today. That means I'm 8% healthier. Right. Yeah, that's not how it works. Yeah. I think it is like just temporarily you're doing better for a second than you were before,

but you know, whatever. Let me give you a hint, buddy. Find a local beekeeper, and I mean local, like no more than five, six miles from your house. Okay. Got one. Okay. Great.

Take a little of that honey, drizzle it on some nice full fat Greek yogurt. Sit back and enjoy. You will be, that's all you need. That's it. If you want to add some other stuff, like some sliced almonds or whatever on it. That's fine too. Or fruit and granola. I find really good raw local honey, and in Greek yogurt, it's just like you're eating

health is what it feels like. Yeah. I mean, I like the taste on its own, but you get the health benefits from that honey too. You do. Yeah. I mean, throw some broccoli in there. Throw a little broccoli in there, a Tonka truck, anything you can find. Just put it under your yogurt and start eating.

So we covered some of this stuff in our probiotics cast. Yeah. A lot. From, how many years ago was that? 2014. Okay. Four years ago. But I felt like yogurt deserved to live on its own.

I was incredulous at first, but I came around actually. I was like, Chuck's right. So let's get into it. I guess we should talk history because yogurt is one of those kind of great accidental discoveries that came from many, many years ago, kind of like a beer and stuff like that. Because people, they think it's pretty clear that at some point, many thousands of years ago in the Middle East, people were transporting stuff like milk, maybe like a goat's milk or whatever.

Probably goat and sheep first. Yeah. And they were transporting that in whatever disgusting animal bladder or whatever they used to transport liquids and things like that. They got there and they were like, ah, this stuff is turned. It stinks. But you know, it's a thousand years from being civilized humanity, so let's just try this stuff.

All right. Like who's going to care or no? Somebody clarked me some honey. Yeah. So they clarked themselves a little honey. They ate a little bit of it. It was thicker now and it had this kind of sour tangy taste. And one of those ancient Middle Eastern people said, hey, this is not bad.

Right. And I think there's this guy named Adam Maskovich who wrote a post on The Salt who basically said it's not entirely an understatement to say like civilization was in part built on yogurt. That was pretty neat. It really was. Because so all of a sudden you have milk and everybody at the time was like, I can feed this to my kid, but I can't keep milk down.

I poop all over my saddle basically while we're out riding because this is the Mongolian steppes, right? But I have found that this weird tangy version, the sour version of milk that you call yogurt, that doesn't affect me at all. It's the weirdest thing. And so as more people were able to eat this stuff, which is full of nutrients, lots of calories, and it has a tantalizing taste, people kind of gathered around the areas that had yogurt and other stuff too, he points out like cheese and things like that and bread

and beer. It's possible beer was the real reason that civilization was started. But yogurt played no small role in that in its fermentation, it has transformed from something that people who are lactose intolerant can't take to something that people who are lactose intolerant can't actually eat and benefit from. Yeah. So they had that conversation and at the end of it, one of them said, also is it weird that we're humans and we're drinking animal milk as adults?

And they went, don't worry about that. Yeah. And stuff thinking yourself is more than an animal, you're an animal. So it really thrived in the Middle East. They love the stuff like you were talking about. It's actually a Turkish word, yogurt is. And it took a little bit longer to catch up to Europe. I think at the end of the 19th century is really when it started to spread wide in Europe.

And then here in the United States, it took to like the middle half of the 20th century when it was mass marketed by Danon for, and it's not like we didn't eat yogurt at all, but definitely not like it. I mean, in the Middle East, it was, it's not like, oh, we'll just eat some of this for breakfast with fruit. I mean, it's in a lot of great, great dishes and dips and sauces and it's kind of one of the staples of a lot of Middle Eastern food. So they're doing it right.

Yeah. So the Middle East seems to be the home of yogurt. It was the home of civilization and they think that yogurt's as old as civilization, maybe a little older. And Turkey seems to be some sort of like kind of fulcrum for the spread of yogurt throughout the world. Yeah. And in fact, the word yogurt is a Turkish word.

It comes from yogurt mak, which is Turkish meaning to thicken. And Turkey, the fact that we in the English-speaking world call it yogurt suggests that it was the Turks who introduced the West to yogurt, but they're also pretty sure that Turkey was the ones who introduced yogurt to India as well. And the neighbors, the neighboring areas around Turkey like Bulgaria, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Iran, like all these areas are pretty famous for eating a lot of yogurt and even having their own kind of yogurt or their own version of it. But something about Turkey really seems to be the pivot point for the spread of yogurt

in the world. Yeah. And I can't find... Oh yeah, here it is. Even today, it says that Turkish people eat about... And this was like four or five years ago. 282 cups of yogurt per person per year, which is definitely more than in the United States. Well, it was at the time.

We have since caught up quite a bit. I think yeah, I think that stat for us is poundage though, right? Yes. How many pounds of yogurt do we eat? So we ate 4.8 billion pounds of yogurt in 2017. What? 4.8 billion pounds in the United States alone. Yeah, we're not like the highest yogurt-eating civilization on the planet by far, but that's

like about 15 pounds per person or no, 13.7 pounds per person, which really it sounds like a lot, but yogurt weighs a lot. So it's actually just 36 servings per person per year in the United States. Wow. So that's, yeah, in Turkey, 282 cups? Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah.

I think you were saying like yogurt didn't really make its way over to the States until the 20th century, right? Yes. And I think it was, and you said it was Danin that brought it here. That's right, in the Bronx. Yeah, they moved their operations from Spain, Barcelona, I think, to the Bronx, which is really weird because like America was not a yogurt-eating culture at all. No pun intended?

Not really, no. So they brought yogurt to a place that, where in the world would be the hardest place to get a foothold business-wise? Let's move our operations there. So they moved it to the Bronx and then just started slowly working on America. And it wasn't until they figured out the fruit on the bottom thing that America said, okay, we like this. It's sweet.

It's not some disgusting, tangy, soured milk. We can put like compote and jam in it and it's good. And that is when it started to take off. And basically you have Danin yogurt to thank for bringing yogurt to America. And it wasn't until, what, maybe 2010 or 13 before we finally started to shed all the extra gunk and actually get into yogurt the way that the rest of the world's been eating it for thousands of years with like what we call Greek yogurt. The way the good Lord intended.

That's right. You want to take a break? Yeah. Cool. You want to take a break and we're going to come back with more yogurt. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step

by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. All right. So we talked about probiotics in the episode on probiotics. Yeah. This was a good episode if I remember correctly. It was. So as a brief recap, probiotics in food, they're like culture concentrates in some kind, in some foods.

Sometimes they're in dietary supplements. Sometimes they're in things like yogurt and cheese, fermented dairy products. And if they're usually bacteria, sometimes you can yeast connect as a probiotic. But when you generally think probiotic, you think of good bacteria used to ferment milk. And then sometimes with things like yogurt, they add in other bacteria on top of that. Right. Which is great, just add some more bacteria, as long as it's the good kind, basically. Yeah, but sometimes they add bacteria that's not considered probiotic, too.

Right. I looked that up. I couldn't find what they were talking about unless it's actually a probiotic bacteria that just hasn't been shown to be probiotic at this time. Yeah, maybe so. That's all I could get from it. So with probiotics, just a quick overview, it's beneficial bacteria that's in your gut. And when you're born, you're not born with your own microbiome.

I think you get it from breast milk and you get a coating of it as you exit your mother's vagina. So you develop it pretty quickly, but it's kind of gifted to you very shortly after birth. Yeah, you build it out. Exactly. So as you age and live, like some stuff dies, some stuff gets pooped out of you, but it's constantly reproducing, but the point of probiotics, whether it's in pill form or whether it is a prebiotic, like a banana, something that can feed probiotic bacteria, or if it's yogurt,

is to replenish the bacteria, this good, healthy bacteria that lives in your gut and does all sorts of things from help you produce a serotonin that stabilizes your mood to digesting your food and moving poop through your intestines faster. All the amazing things. I also want to direct people. We did a microbiome episode, which is one of the all-time most fascinating episodes we ever did. Do you remember that one?

The poop cast? No, no. The one that's our microbiome. Oh, right. That was just on how completely made up, I think like 90% of our cells are actually not ours. They're part of the microbiome of bacteria that live on us and interact with us. And that's what you're doing when you're eating yogurt is bringing in some friends,

some reinforcements to the good bacteria. That's the point of probiotics. Yeah. So in order to, and we'll get into the health effects here in a minute, but in order to get that bacteria and have it survive through gastric acid, I mean, it's an inhospitable environment down there in your gut and in your intestines. Well, first of all, they do think that yogurt might be just a good vehicle for that period because it's thick and goopy and it acts like a buffer against that acid.

But you also have to have a lot of it because a lot of it is going to die off. So there are organizations that set minimum standards and one of them is the National Yogurt Association of the United States. You don't want to mess with them, trust me. They'll break your legs. It's just for even looking at them. They're tough individuals. They really are collectively.

So I believe the requirement is 100 million bacteria per gram if you want to have that seal on it. This is, if you want to eat yogurt, I mean, if you want to just go get a stick of gogurt and shove it down your throat and get a sugar rush, have at it, but if you actually want that live and active culture seal stamped on your yogurt, then you're going to have to have 100 million bacteria per gram. Right. And it has to be specific bacteria too.

The FDA decreed in 1981 that if you're going to sell something in the U.S. as yogurt, it has to contain lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus. We'll talk a little more about those later, but you have to have those and then you have to have them in amounts of at least 100 million individual bacterium of those strains per gram of yogurt or else, buddy, that ain't yogurt. That ain't yogurt. That ain't your mom's yogurt. That ain't your dad's yogurt.

It's nobody's yogurt. No. Not as far as the FDA's concerned. If you thought the National Yogurt Association was tough, boy, howdy, the FDA will mess you up. So you want to talk a little bit about how they make yogurt? Yes, but first, get this. So you know you were talking about how yogurt or bacteria can, some can survive in the gut,

which can be inhospitable. I was like, how, how did they do that? Some are just coated in like a polysaccharide. That's fine. That's boring. So bacteria actually have pumps that are designed to pump acid out of the bacteria. So when it's floating around in this bath of stomach acid and juice and digestive enzymes, it's just pumping it out and keeping it just happy as a lark, but it has like a mechanism

for getting rid of the acid that should otherwise kill it. I just thought that was fascinating. Man, life sciences. What else? Earth science. Earth science, life science. Just science basically. Yeah.

Yeah. It all floats my boat. What kind of science do you hate? Hmm. Psychology. No, I find it fascinating. Okay. I don't know, man.

I don't think I hate any science. Yeah, no, I don't hate any science. See their kids? No, science is hate worthy. No. Don't hate science. Yeah. Clark yourself some Josh.

We just spun my head right around. Did you see that? I did. That was strange. But it is October. It is the month of exorcism. It's the Dancing Headstones best season. What was the name of the band?

I can't remember. Oh, man, we could have just buzz marketed that guy so well. All right. When you're making yogurt, like you said, it was many, many, many years ago, it was just this curdled milk and they were like, if you hold your nose tight enough, you can still eat this stuff and it doesn't really upset your stomach that much. But if you're going to manufacture yogurt, what you want to do is separate the milk into the cream and the skim and this is automatically going to get a thicker texture going because

it's got a lot of fat and it's evaporating some of the liquid anyway during this process. But then they might say, you know what, let's add some milk powder or some gelatin. We really need to get this to the good yogurt-y consistency that everybody loves. So now it's pretty thick at this point and then they pasteurize it. And we should do a show on pasteurization and maybe even homogenization. Maybe they could go together. I think so because homogenizing just basically means stirring. Yeah.

So pasteurization, there's a lot to that, a lot of history and everything, but homogenized, I think they've really churched that up. It's just stirring something. Yeah. To make it more homogenous. Right. It's pretty amazing. The word fits perfectly.

It really does. So these high temperatures that you get through pasteurization is going to help make it even more thick, but you don't need to like blast it at 300 degrees for eight hours or whatever. No, you don't want to do that. It's kind of amazing actually that it only takes about 15 seconds at 171 degrees Fahrenheit and that'll kill off the bacteria that you don't want there. So you know how both of our schedules are just insane right now? Yes.

I was starting to feel a little worn down. Sure. It's just the tiniest tickle in my nose and I was like, no, I'm not having it. So I busted out the old netty pot. Yeah. And then I got the double purified tap water out of my water purifier. And then I put it into a pot and boiled it for five minutes and stuck the netty pot in and left it in for another five minutes boiling.

Then I took that out and boiled more water for five minutes. And then finally after it cooled, I put it through my nose and I looked it up. I'm like, is that overkill? Is it not enough? It's overkill. It is overkill. From what I saw, what you really need is to, once the water gets to a boil, something like 99.9999% of any pathogen is dead.

But I think, I can't remember who recommends it, maybe the CDC. Somebody recommends at least letting it boil for a minute just to be safe. And then if you're above 2,000 feet overseas level, you want to boil it for three minutes because there's a lower temperature required for boiling at higher altitudes, right? So really it's a, boil it for a minute is even overkill. But I'm going to stick with my five minute boiling thing. I still don't boil it at all. Dude, do you know what would happen if you got just the off chance of a brain eating

amoeba in there? No, I know, but I also don't like get scared walking around during a lightning storm. I don't either. And I just feel like it's about as unlikely. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, then promise me this.

Uh-huh. You will never netty pot with water that you just got out of a stagnant creek. Okay. All right. Is that a deal at least? Sure. But can I still pour that into my open wounds? No.

Okay. Just steer clear of that water altogether. All right. Fair enough. All right. All right. So at this point, Josh has boiled his water for 20 minutes. My milk.

Let it cool for an hour. Pour it through his nostril system. This is how I make yogurt. No. After they boil for 15 seconds or heat that milk up for 15 seconds, your cream is separating at that point just naturally from the milk because of the temperature. That's when they stir it or homogenize the milk and create that consistency because you don't want anything that has a consistency of curdling.

No, you don't. So homogenization is just stirring it up so you're breaking up the fat globules so that they're spread evenly throughout the milk, which just means it's not lumpy milk. It's smooth textured milk. And the same thing, I guess that translates to the yogurt. It makes the yogurt smoother, more consistently smooth because it's homogenized milk that it's made from. Yes.

Okay. Bam. Homogenization. We just did the homogenization episode. That could have been a short stuff. It could have. I don't even know if it would have qualified for that. Well, we're going to start releasing one called Shortest Stuff.

It's just like 45 seconds long. That is our future. So here's the most important part. You think your yogurt's done, but it's not because if you want it to be yogurt, you're going to have to pour some good bacteria back in there and this is like, it kind of depends on which company you work for, what kind of yogurt they want, but they're going to select their bacteria accordingly, dump it in there. Yes.

I mean, this is where the actual, all you have is hot milk up to this point, hot homogenized milk. It's when you add that bacteria in to this warm milk that it starts to happen. And you want to let the milk cool a little bit first because if it's too hot, they're going to die. But when it cools to something like, I think 115 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, then you can add your bacteria and they're going to start to go to work. And all they're doing is basically fermenting the milk into yogurt.

That's it. Yeah, which is why if you're lactose intolerant, you can still tolerate yogurt because that bacteria gets in there, metabolizes that milk sugar, the lactose, and poops out lactic acid. And you can, lactic acid is fine on the body. Yeah. So not only, this is just amazing. This is when I started to get jazzed by the yogurt. Not only does it break down lactic or lactose into other kinds of sugars that are more digestible

by the human body, these bacteria actually deposit in your gut when you eat yogurt. They deposit an enzyme that helps you break down the lactose that is found in there. So they break it down themselves and then they help you break it down too, which is why people who are lactose intolerant can still usually eat yogurt unless you have a severe lactose allergy. I think it's just intolerance you can usually eat yogurt. Yeah. And remember I talked about myself in my lactose intolerance and like, is it in my lactose

intolerant or should I just not eat a pizza and a pint of ice cream? It turns out it's B. Is that right? Yeah, man. If I eat a reasonable amount of cheese and milk, I'm fine. Yeah, less farty. Yeah, a lot less farty. Good.

The whole world is thanking you buddy for coming to that, doing that experiment. Or at least everyone in this room. So pretty amazing that yogurt deposits an enzyme that helps you break down lactose, right? Yeah. Okay. It gets even more amazing. One of the other things, one of the reasons why people say you should eat yogurt if you need protein is, first of all, it's from milk, so there's tons of protein.

But secondly, the acids or the bacteria in there actually break down the protein. So it becomes what's called more bioavailable. It's easier for your body to take in, which normally your body doesn't have trouble absorbing protein anyway, but if it does, yogurt's your guy. But then also, it actually synthesizes some vitamins out of whole cloth. There may not be a lot of folate found in milk, there's more of it found in yogurt because these bacteria during fermentation produce folate, which is something that you really want and need, especially if you're pregnant.

So there's just some amazing things going on during the fermentation process from milk to yogurt that makes it its own thing. It's much more than just soured milk. It's something, it's like a new thing. Yeah. And the fact that they found this accidentally from carrying sheep's milk around in some animal skin or animal's stomach, it's 10,000 years ago, it just makes it even more fascinating. Yeah, it's awesome.

And the fact that you can add fruit on the bottom is really the icing. Boy, Americans love a gimmick, and I think that was all about the gimmick. I'm sure then some boardroom, they were like, it's interactive, it's fun. Actually, I know the story behind that. Rather than fun, it's probably the words they used. It was actually suggested in 1947, I think, by a young guy named Juan Metzger, whose dad was one of the co-founders of Danon, and he was just a lowly bottle washer at the time, but he suggested that as a way to get Americans to eat it.

But at the time, the USDA said, you can't mix anything with dairy products, it's against the law. What? Somehow, Danon convinced the USDA that, no, no, the fruit's on the bottom, so it's not really mixing. If they put it on the top, the USDA would have said, that's mixing. If they had mixed it, homogenized it, I guess, they would have considered that mixing. But the fact that it was on the bottom, that is why they got away with it.

Somehow, it doesn't make any sense to me. It's like the Jeopardy being somehow different from the typical quiz show. Right. It's the same thing. But the USDA went along with it, and that's why it was fruit on the bottom. Interesting. And there wasn't like some senator from South Carolina that said, you're counting on the good people of America to mix their own fruit?

It's pretty good. I don't even know who that was supposed to be. It sounded like Leonardo DiCaprio and Django Unchained. He really did. Like he was the senator. Man, that movie, that whole sister subplot, what even a subplot, that was so strange in that movie. Which?

Remember, Leonardo DiCaprio's sister arrived or whatever, and he was just like, where's my beautiful sister? And it was just so over the top and strange, and it was never explained, like, are they lovers? What's going on? Yeah. So weird. I love Quentin Tarantino stuff, man.

I love hate it. Oh, really? I don't hate any bit of it. I love it. Oh, I think he's far too indulgent these days, but... You didn't like the hateful eight, huh? You know, I liked the first four endings. Are you looking forward to the Manson family when he's there?

Yeah, I mean, I go see all of them, and I think they're all worthwhile, and they're Tarantino movies, so I kind of just put my tongue in my cheek and laugh no matter what, but... What was his best one in your opinion? Oh, well, I mean, probably Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction. For me. Yeah. Yeah. But so don't get me wrong, I'm not a hater, but there's clearly no one in his camp that's

like, maybe edit some down, maybe don't be in the movie. That'll be the day. That'll be the day. Did you like True Romance? Well, yeah, but he just wrote that. Yeah, but it's obviously his work, even though he didn't direct it. No, I love it. That's one of my faves.

That was a good one. I mean, who cast Gary Oldman for that role? Tony Scott, I guess. That's just so bizarre, but I think it was so cool. Sit down, have an egg roll. It's a good movie. All right, so let's take a break, and we will get to the bottom, the fruit on the bottom, if you will, about nutrition and how...

If that's real or not, right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

You ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Life in relationships, life in general can get messy.

You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, yogurt, nutritious or just delish? All right, so here's the deal.

Yogurt has really caught on in the United States in the last, like, decade, more than ever, largely because it's being touted and sold as a health food. Dude. Big time. There are studies that are coming in that says it helps with everything from reducing obesity, type two diabetes, cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, improves pregnancy outcomes, reduces allergies, improves bone health and dental health, basically anything you can think of.

There's been a study that has found that, but from what I'm gathering, either there's not enough studies, which seems not the case to me, or that there are other studies that are finding contradictory evidence to what the pro-yogurt studies are finding. There doesn't seem to be any study that's like, no, no, put the yogurt down. It's going to kill all of us. Nothing like that. But there's, it just seems like the jury's still out on whether it's actually beneficial to you or not, at least over any kind of long term.

Yeah. So here's what we know for sure. I mean, just ingredient-wise, especially if you're lactose intolerant, you can get a lot of good calcium from yogurt that you wouldn't get, or that you would get if you drank milk or whatever, but if you're lactose intolerant, you can get it through yogurt. Vitamin D, protein, potassium, riboflavin, these are all things that are in yogurt that we know are good for you. But it's like health claims that they're selling people now, which is what we're really

talking about here. Like you said, will it actually help you lose weight? And there have been some studies that indicate that it could, but there are a lot of caveats attached, it feels like, like the International Journal of Obesity says that low-fat yogurt could help you lose weight. It's kind of like, that's because you're replacing a meal with some yogurt as a substitution, or for a snack, and it's kind of filling, so you're going to be eating less. And all these things are kind of true, but it's a little misleading.

It is. And actually, you also want to be careful, like, okay, if you're on a diet and you're using low-fat yogurt to diet with, but you're health conscious, you want to be careful because a lot of the low-fat or no-fat yogurts replace the fat with other stuff like artificial sweeteners like aspartame and saccharin. There's usually a lot of sodium in there to try to replace some of the flavor that's lost when you take all the fat out. So there's a lot of push and pull, and yeah, it does seem to be where if you are already

healthy and you eat yogurt regularly, but a lot, then maybe you'll start to see some actual health effects, but there's never been a study that showed, yes, yogurt is such a powerhouse that it can knock out rheumatoid arthritis. And those are kind of the claims that people are making. And there's like some bases, there's some kernel of truth to it, like one of the big things now with dieting is, or not dieting, but eating right or eating healthy, I guess, whatever you want to call it, is this idea that when you eat, your body becomes inflamed as part of the immune response, like what did you just eat?

What is that? What is that? And it goes in kind of like defense mode to sort things out. Well, the idea is that over time, if you're eating stuff that sets off your immune response, your inflammatory response pretty much constantly, that has a terrible effect on your body and can manifest itself in things like inflammatory diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. So the logic is, and they've shown that, yes, yogurt can actually possibly maybe reduce your inflammatory response.

So it's going from yogurt might be able to lessen your inflammatory response to some really, really bad food to yogurt can cure rheumatoid arthritis, and that's the problem. Yeah, especially in women, it seems to have a little bit better chance at reducing inflammation. They did this one study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Go Badgers, right? Wolverines. Boy, I think it's got to be Badgers, right? It is the Badgers.

I'm just giving them a hard time. I didn't know if that was, yeah, that's Madison, of course. We need to do a show there, by the way. We do, or we could just make everybody drive to Milwaukee. It's an hour away. I did like Milwaukee. It was a great show. That was a cool town.

So they did a study where they had 60 women, half of whom were obese, and they had them eat 12 ounces of low-fat yogurt every day for nine weeks, then a control group, of course, with eating non-dairy pudding, which is like, what is that, like snack packs? I don't know. And they measured levels of proteins, it says excreted by immune cells to determine how much inflammation was in their body. So they're trying to measure the inflammatory response that you're talking about. And they did find that the yogurt ladies, as they like to be called, saw improvements

in some markers of inflammation. But again, that's a long way from saying it can help your rheumatoid arthritis. Right. That's part of the problem. I think people just want it. It's just such a great idea, this natural thing that's been with humanity since the dawn of civilization can actually help cure some of these modern ailments from our modern world.

People want that to be the truth so bad. I don't see anything wrong with that, but it's not necessarily the case, I think. Yes. And it was also, this study was funded by the National Dairy Council. And again, the doctor who performed it. Of course, he was like, it doesn't matter where the money came from, same conclusion. So you can take him at his word, I guess. I'm not saying he's in the pocket of big dairy, which we laugh, but I'm sure that's

a thing. Well, the National Yogurt Association, they're the legbreakers for the dairy association. But like I said earlier, because there's a lot of protein in yogurt, it will make you feel more full and you might have fewer unhealthy snacks. So it's one of those things like, is it really making that difference or is it just causing you to change patterns? Right. Which is fine.

Yeah. Oh yeah. Again, there's nobody who's saying, no, eating yogurt's bad for you. You do want to watch it. If you are trying to lose weight, eating full fat yogurt, too much full fat yogurt, especially if you're eating it in addition to other stuff rather than using it to replace something, you can gain weight. I think the average weight gain in that one study you were talking about from both the

yogurt and the pudding cohorts was like a kilogram, I think. Yeah. A couple of pounds over like nine weeks or something like that. So that's a significant amount of weight gain, but they were eating like 12 ounces. That's two full servings of yogurt every day. That's a lot of yogurt. It's a lot. I like yogurt, but it's not the kind of food you sit down and eat a bowl of, you know?

No. You definitely, you want it in its own little amount. It's like a grape nuts bowl, you know? Yeah. And for parents, you know, gogurt, not to pick on them, but they definitely market that. I used to do, I did a couple of gogurt commercials back in the day as a PA. Yeah. You know, they definitely market towards kids, it's packaged in a little kid-friendly fun

way to eat. And we're not saying yogurt's bad for kids, but that stuff is loaded with sugar and calories from sugar. Sure. Yeah. So just know that going in. From what I understand, the closest thing to actual yogurt that you can get in the United States is something like Greek yogurt.

That's only kind of eat. I think it tastes best. It is. It's fantastic. Like plain Greek yogurt. And then you just add a little honey. Don't forget the honey, Chuck. I got to, I got to call my beekeeper.

There's also something called, there's traditional Bulgarian yogurt. Bulgaria is very well known for its yogurt love. They have something called Kicello Miljaco, which means soured milk. And I just think of Balki Bartakamus saying it. Was that his last name? Yeah. From Perfect Strangers? Yeah.

What was it? Balki Bartakamus. Bartakamus. Bartakamus. I don't think I ever heard that. Yeah. I never heard of it. Oh, you are missing out.

The episode where they were moving a piano up like a couple of flights of stairs. Is that a real episode? Yes, it was. Chuck and I, I would put my money on this. It is one of the greatest examples of physical comedy in television history. I mean, that's an old thing. Like friends had an episode of moving a couch upstairs. These guys make friends look like piles of walking poop.

That's how good, that's how good this Perfect Strangers episode was. Like friends doesn't even want to talk about it. Oh man. But I mean, that's a classic bit like the Marx Brothers or, you know, or one more or one more or something. Or Buster Keaton probably first came up with it. Yeah, he moved a piano or two in his day. You want to talk about the In Soviet Georgia Yogurt campaign real quick?

Yeah, I actually did not get to see that, so you can teach me. Okay, so in 1977, Danin, who really is almost single-handedly responsible for bringing yogurt and making it popular in America, in the 70s, they came out with an ad campaign called In Soviet Georgia, where they went to Georgia, one of the Soviet Union's republics at the time, and found like 100 plus year old people who were still vital and active and said, hey, can we film you like bailing hay, and then afterward you'll eat like a nice cup of Danin yogurt, and people will say, hey, that's great, I want to be bailing hay at 105 like this person.

And it was kind of risky at the time because this is the Cold War, the late 70s, the Soviet Union and the United States were not friends. But to advertise to the United States, they sent their ad people to the Soviet Union, and it just went off. It was total hit. Like Danin, their sales were in the gutter, and all of a sudden, they're just back on top. And it's actually credited with kicking off this, what we think of now is like normal,

but the yogurt craze that started in the late 70s, early 80s, and continued on, and it's finally gotten to the point where we're actually starting to eat healthy yogurt. That was that commercial in Soviet Georgia. Crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. I found one guy who was 89, and they said his mother was 114, and they filmed them in one of the commercials, and they said he ate two cups, and it made his mother very proud,

but he's 89. That was the big joke. 114, man. Yeah. All from eating yogurt. I need to get on it. Got anything else? If I want to live to be 114.

You got to start eating some yogurt, and don't forget the honey. God, could you imagine me at 114? Yeah. Actually, I can, now that you mentioned it. Nobody wants that. I could totally see it. You'd be like, I'm back to the whole pizza and whole thing of ice cream thing, so you might want to stand back.

Wow, this one had a lot of fart and poop jokes. Yeah. Well, it happens. Well, if you want to know more about yogurt, go eat some yogurt. Eat the good stuff. Learn to love it, and your stomach will be happy whether science can prove that it is or not. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail.

All right, I'm going to call this self-professed medievalist. This guy, Steven Gray, wrote in, and he's from Melbourne, Australia, but living in London now. And he says I'm writing for some extra info, to give you extra info for the Robin Hood episode. First of all, Josh talks about Rich slash Johnny Sitch, and says that Richard was king of England for two years, and that John was the natural heir. Rich, he was actually king for 10 years, but spent only six months of his reign in England. While he was off on the third crusade, he left his chancellor, William of Longchamp,

as regent. But his brother, John, was cranky about it and schemed against him, inciting a rebellion. When Rich eventually got back, he forgave Johnny, named him heir to the throne, so the bad king John, good king Richard Bitt, of the R.H. Canon, is actually based in fact. Wow, that's interesting. Perhaps more interesting, he says. I set up, by the way.

Thank you. When the Robin Hood story started coming out during the reign of Henry III, it was during a period where Henry was waging war for his lands in Gascony, France. Henry was not a very strong welder, charismatic king, so he didn't get along super well with his nobles, and as a result, to raise funds for the war effort, he had to rely more heavily on his foresters and sheriffs to raise some mega taxes. So the Robin Hood stories pit our hero against these extortionate representatives of a nasty villainous king, but of course, you can't directly suggest that's the current king,

so you have to be not so subtle and point to a recent but previous scenario, which everyone will draw the parallels from. Wow. This guy's not just a self-proclaimed medievalist, I officially confirm him as a medievalist. He says, hope this helps your insatiable appetite to keep learning as your podcast does mine. Nice. I love you guys. That is Steven Gray.

Thanks a lot, Steven. That was a great email. We love you too. Let's hug. Yeah. Hey, you go, Steven. If you want to get in touch with us like Steven did, we want to hear from you. You can go to stuffyoushouldknow.com and find all of our social links there, and you can

send us an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.