Activia Vs. Yogurt

Advertisements claiming that Dannon's Activia yogurt provides clinically proven probiotic benefits to digestion and immunity helped the company earn hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of the product. Dannon sells Activia at prices up to 30 percent higher than other yogurts. The probiotic party ended when a class-action lawsuit awarded consumers $45 million in damages because the Dannon engaged in deceptive advertising, according to ABC News. Scientific research does not confirm that Dannon's Activia confers benefits superior to that of any other yogurt containing live, active bacterial cultures.

What Is Yogurt?

Yogurt is a fermented milk product. Live bacterial cultures inoculate the milk and instigate the fermentation process that creates yogurt. These bacterial cultures remain live in the yogurt unless it undergoes processes such as pasteurization that destroys them. Ingesting some species of live bacterial cultures, called probiotics, confers certain health benefits, such as improving lactose intolerance and relieving the symptoms of a number of gastrointestinal disorders such as antibiotic-associated diarrhea and ulcerative colitis, according to the Harvard Medical School Family Health Guide.

What Is "Strain Specificity"?

Activia's supposed superiority to other yogurts involves the concept of "strain specificity." As Harvard notes, different types of probiotic bacteria confer different effects. Not all strains are beneficial to all types of illness. Activia implies that its trademarked species of bacteria confers superior health benefits to other strains, though independent research that compares it to other strains does not back this up.

What Is Activia?

The advertisements for Activia are bright and cheery, and some feature celebrity endorsements. But in the end, Activia is simply yogurt. It differs from other yogurts in that the bacteria that create the yogurt are a species the Dannon company calls "Bifidus regularis." Dannon has trademarked the strain, and it is not found in any other yogurt.

What Is "Bifidus regularis"?

"Bifidus regularis" is the term Dannon uses to describe the bacterial culture used in Activia products that are sold in the US. In the Netherlands, Dannon calls the same bacteria "Bifidus actiregularis," and in Argentina is it simply referred to as "Actiregularis" on Dannon's product labeling, according to Jane Kinsey, professor of Applied Economics at the Food Industry Center at the University of Minnesota. Scientifically, these names mean nothing. They are branding strategies used to appeal to consumers' subjective interpretations of pseudoscientific sounding terms that imply that the bacteria are "active" and help keep you "regular."

The actual scientific name of this bacterium is Bifidobacterium animalis lactis. The Langone Medical Center at New York University states that Bifidobacterium animalis has demonstrated effectiveness in relieving constipation in people with irritable bowel syndrome, but other types of probiotic bacteria, such as Lactobacillus plantarum and Lactobacillus acidophilus, have similar effects.