Healthy Food Choices: Yogurt

Yogurt is a healthy and balanced food that contains both carbohydrates and protein. Learn more about adding this healthy choice into your diet in this video clip.

Take Action

Healthy and balanced food
Contains both carbohydrates and protein
Live bacteria in yogurt promotes healthy intestine

About this Author

Alice Merritt is currently the Campus Dietitian at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She has a masters degree from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in public health with a concentration on nutrition. Alice has worked as a registered dietician for four years, and believes that helping people reach their nutritional goals will lead to a long and healthy life.

ALICE MERRITT: Now I'm going to talk to you about yogurt. Yogurt is actually a very healthy, balanced food. Yogurt has both carbohydrate and protein, and another great thing about yogurt is it has live microorganisms or healthy bacteria that promote good intestinal health. We want to have healthy bacteria in our intestines because it actually outgrows unhealthy bacteria that can cause disease and illness and also yeast that can grow in our intestines. When you're looking for yogurt, you still want to try to choose the lower fat choices like fat-free yogurt or reduced fat yogurt. You can also buy sugar-free yogurts that reduce the calorie intake. Some yogurts where they use regular sugars and fruit syrups can be higher in calories. So important things to remember with yogurt is still you want to look for lower fat varieties, it's a very healthy protein source, it's a wonderful calcium source, we need about a thousand of milligrams of calcium a day, and yogurt is one way that you can really boost your calcium intake. So add yogurt to things like cereals, smoothies, sauces and all of these things will help boost your calcium intake and these are healthy recommendations for yogurt.

Healthy Food Choices: Yogurt Video

Take Action

About this Author

Member Comments