More on Yoghurt

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Laveviewer asked: I have two questions: Are homemade yogurt and ice-cream better for you than the commercial varieties? I'm thinking that if you make these products and use them within a week or two, you don't need to worry about preservatives.

Neither yoghurt nor icecream have preservative generally. If they do, it is usually from the flavourings. Sauces and fruit purees often have preservatives, notably sulphites and sorbic acid. The preservative are there to keep the flavourings from going off before being used.

Once a frozen product, like ice cream, is produced it has a considerable lifetime as freezing is a natural form of preservation.

Part of the benefit of yoghurt is its bacteria content, so in this type of product preservatives can be a problem in a different way. Yoghurt usually relies on it's acidity to inhibit stray bugs.

Both can be made at home, time and enthusiasm permitting. You also have a better input into possible flavours. I made a delicious grapefruit and honey sorbet last summer. You wont find that in the shops.

But are they better for you? Hard to say. Commercial icecream had a pile of stabilizers and emulsifiers, and often a bare minimum of fat, possibly not even dairy fat if they call it iced confection. But home made icecream can be made with eggs and cream, it is really a frozen custard - infinitely superior in flavour but moderation required!

Home made yoghurt is fine as long as you use proper care and sanitation for making it.
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Food Additives

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Courtney asked for my “thoughts on food additives in our diet. Specifically, what is your scientific and always logical take on artificial colors/dyes and preservatives in the food and their impact on behavior?”

The answer varies with the additive unfortunately.

Additives fall into a variety of categories but the first major split is into colours and others. Courtney specifically refers to colours, antioxidants and artificial sweeteners.

Colours
Colours are really for cosmetic purposes only and serve no useful purpose to the consumer. They can make pallid and insipid looking foods look more attractive (eg: adding yellow to pasta, cakes or ice-cream makes them look a richer colour, as if they have eggs in them.).

There is no doubt that colours are not necessary. They are an aesthetic additive.

Antioxidants (BHA, BHT, TBHQ)
These additives are generally added to oils and oil containing products to delay the onset of rancidity and extend shelf life; to this end they serve a useful purpose. As well as flavour deterioration, the by-products of rancidity, peroxides and acids, are considered to be harmful. This is where antioxidants have a problem: they are an additive but, unlike colours, they do serve a functional purpose. And this is where the regulators need to walk a fine line: the health risks of the additive vs the health risks of not using the additive.

Artificial Sweeteners
These are more insidious additives, in my mind. There is no denying that obesity is a growing problem (!) but is replacing sugar with something sweet but without calories the answer? It is not training people to enjoy unsweetened food but rather maintaining a need for a certain level of sweetness. Also people do false bargains with the devil when they say “I had a diet cola so I can have a chocolate bar”.

Preservatives
This is a fairly broad group of additives. Sulphur Dioxide is used very widely for different reasons. With the likes of sausages, they will not last a day raw without preservative (because you are seeding the minced raw meat with bacteria filled other components – flours, spices etc.). Dried fruit, such as apricots, go dark brown without preservative but will survive quite well without it IF they are properly dried. If they are kept still moist, (could they be being sold by weight?) yeasts can grow in them. Many soft drinks contain the preservative Benzoic Acid to prevent the growth of bacteria during storage. Again there is the issue of the health risks of using the additive vs the health risks of not using the additive.

At one level, it seems logical that manufacturers will not use additives unless they feel that they are needed in their food. Why incur an unnecessary cost? But reality is that the cost of the additive is not great and the ability of the manufacturers to control the amounts added is variable. Ultimately, as an insurance, they often use too muych rather than too little.

That was the easy bit.

“Are these additives harmful?” is a harder question. At some point everything is harmful. One grain of sand will bounce off you shoulder, a truck full dumped on you will smother you. Do additives impact on children’s behaviour? Quite possibly. There is the issue of causality though. This is something that I will probably come back to time and time again in this blog. Do colours make your child hyperactive? Or is it the sugars that are often present with the colours? Or something else altogether?

Ultimately it is something that must be decided on a case by case basis. If they affect your child, all the assurances of the ‘experts’ amount to nothing; they affect your child.
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