Another unclear food label - live cultures in yoghurt.

[awayandaway]

I have just discovered the bit on the yoghurt pot I was eating from that says "live cultures" and it is tiny.

Ok, it IS there, but it is very small, and I am dyslexic. I did check in the shop before picking it up, but I didn't see it.

I now have to contact my cancer nurse arrange a telephone conversation. Not that there is anything she can do now, I have eaten it.

I am going to contact the manufacturer and complain. Particularly on the grounds that a lot of people undergoing chemo are going to have temporary eyesight problems. But obviously, this is dangerous to other people too, not just cancer patients.

I think food with a content that poses a significant danger to a significant proportion of the population should have that warning written in a standard colour, so it is easy to skim the package standing in the super market isle, and find that warning.

There should be a list of ingredients that have to be printed in bright orange, or something, so that if you are scanning for a particular ingredient, and you don't see any bright orange, you know it isn't there.

Of course people who are severely colour blind might have to get someone else to scan for them, but that would solve this issue for most people most of the time, wouldn't it?

There’s no way a nurse said that.

If that happened she should be struck off.

I have not read every response, as it seems to be mostly people who have fallen for the advertising in a big way, and seem to see nothing wrong with sending millions of bacteria down into their guts, with no thought for what would happen to the balance of bacteria already there if this really worked! is up there with accusing people of being “sheeple” and should be treated with the contempt it deserves.

She also said the main danger to the general population from this sort of food is that these bacteria are antibiotic resistant, and that any that do make it alive into the gut can pass that resistance on to any bacteria already there, including pathogenic bacteria.

Just saw this, you cannot get EFSA approval for bacterial strains to use in food production if it has recognizable antibiotic resistance genes and absolutely all strains are fully sequenced now. Most producers re-sequence their production strains annually as part of basic quality control. You are far more likely to encounter antibiotic resistance in a wild strain than a strain produced specifically for food production.

I'm fairly certain it's a fictional nurse 😂

I think the nurse (or at least her advice) may be fictional

You haven't provide ONE source for your claims, beyond hearing it from 1 consultant ages ago. Why do you expect anyone to agree with you?

I just looked into it and I couldn't find anything (parenting resources or research papers) reporting issues with live yogurt. The only concern is for unpasteurised yogurt.

Probiotics are definitely recommended for children by many doctors, for instance after a course of antibiotics, to help restore gut health. It might or might not actually help, but it is in no way dangerous.

@FictionalCharacter Thank you for your post
I studied Food Technology at uni and also know a lot on the subject of yogurts making.
I can not believe of some of responses on here!
People have no idea yet they give advise and wrong information on public forum...

There actually seems to be mixed evidence with regards to people who are EXTREMELY immune compromised and probiotics and it's not hard to find reliable sources advising caution, mostly due to a lack of evidence rather than evidence of harm. How OP has conflated this to include other groups I don't know.

This isn't really a conversation about that though, this is about food labelling, and OP needs to show us the packet or tell us the brand

The OP is not entirely wrong. The problem is her declaring, yogurt is bad for me; therefore, yogurt is bad for everyone.

There are so many different things going on in this thread.

OP is correct in one thing. SOME yoghurts are best avoided by people who are immune compromised due to chemotherapy. There have been several links on here to advice from specific hospitals' oncology departments specifying which are okay, and which (those with added probiotics) are not.

But that's the end of the rational bit. For all the rest of us, the bacteria in yogurts are free of risk and probably positively helpful. Whatever our age.

This is the bit I’m struggling with. As the thread has progressed, the OP appears to be pushing an agenda against all yoghurt. Which begs the question why she had any at all, whether she thought it was live or not.

If bacteria in yoghurt is an issue for a small minority of immunocompromised people then they should be researching brands of heat treated 'dead' yoghurt that is safe for them. Not expecting big warnings that could mislead others and put them off eating a nutritious staple food.

I’m tipping OP’s “nurse” is the same as my MIL’s “doctor” - unregistered and uninsured, peddling all kinds of fictional crap to make money off vulnerable patients.

Your latest update just makes you sound completely batshit. I very much doubt this nurse even exists and if she does she should be sacked if that's the kind of information she is peddling.

I simply don't believe anyone has ever contracted sepsis from yogurt.

They're (mostly) not yoghurt though. They're actually fromage frais which isn't the same thing as yoghurt! They do make a yoghurt but it isn't what most of their range is based on.

Anyway I'm definitely getting bison milk vibes from this thread. So I'm backing out now!

What's bison milk vibes?

Yes, but children are not immunocompromised. The nurse and the OP are saying that live cultures are dangerous for children. They absolutely are not. Premature babies shouldn’t have them… but no newborn baby gets yoghurt! Weaned babies and onwards can absolutely have live culture yoghurt.

So I will repeat that the nurse, and the OP, are idiots.

Live cultures are really beneficial to health, they improve your gut microbiome. Why do you think they’re dangerous?

I did some google scholar googling.

There were indeed cases of sepsis after large amount of probiotics. In SERIOUSLY immunocompromised patients who consumed considerable amounts.
For general population who is not serious immunocompromised probiotocs and live cultures are not harmful (unless one takes it too far but that is with everything).

So either OP is making shite as they go with help of google to pull our leg, OR she completely misread what the cases were about and/or her nurse is simply dummy with no reading comprehension giving patients wrong info.

Now which one do we think is the most probable option....

Quite.

We've gone from:

a complaint about packaging being unclear about labelling (although the ingredient was on the packaging) which led to an immuno-compromised person understandably (if mistakenly) worried that she was going to be ill because she'd eaten a small portion of food containing the problem ingredient

To full on accusations about posters having bought into the "woo" of advertising and nurses saying and advising things which no nurse would ever do, and yoghurt being virtually a silent killer.

Begs the question, (particularly given the OP's later posts about the dangers of yoghurt to almost the entire population (despite her having acknowledged that she did understand after all, that some immuno-compromised people (or indeed, just people) might be ill with a surfeit of good bacteria introduced into their digestive system, but that for the vast majority of people, including oncology patients, not only is it not on a forbidden list, but actively recommended) how in the name of all that's holy, she was allowing it in her house (let alone her mouth) in the first place.

I don't know what the agenda is here. But it's certainly not food labelling.

Interesting.
AS doesn't give much, but you never know.

The "bison" thing is a reference to a troll from last year who posted loads of bonkers threads about bison and sea serpents. They'd start out fairly rational but soon descended into them arguing with absolutely everyone over their opinions on bison breeding or the loch ness monster, lol.

The bison person name changed all the time as they kept getting banned, I think.