 So Sharon, there seems to be a love affair between our gut microbiota and yogurt, if you will. What does science have to say about this? Okay, well that's a really excellent question and the gut microbiota is a hot topic and it's on consumers are thinking about it, scientists are thinking about it and that's because we have trillions of microbes and we know that they interact with us in many ways. They help to maintain our gut health, they help our immune systems to develop, they help to keep us regular and now recent data suggests that they also can affect metabolic diseases like type 2 diabetes and obesity. There's some evidence that the yogurts that we consume can also affect our gut health and it's quite interesting because there's different kinds of bacteria in the yogurt, some that are there in the production of yogurt and others that may be added afterwards. Some of those can sort of get a foothold and actually live in the gut and proliferate and others just pass through. Either way, even if they're just passing through, again studies have shown that there's some beneficial effects. This is in some unhealthy subjects but a lot of the data that we have is actually in patients who have inflammatory bowel diseases or inflammation and in that case consuming yogurt or the probiotic bacteria actually tends to tone down that inflammation. It reduces the immune cells and it also reduces the chemical signals called cytokines that cause inflammation. We know some of the ways that yogurt benefits health. We know a little bit about how that does that as scientists call the mechanisms but we have a lot more research that we need to do and I think it's an exciting time for yogurt and we need to get more of those good quality studies so we can understand the true benefits of yogurt for the gut. So what do you believe the state of our gut reflects in terms of our diet? Well, that's another really good question. We know from studies both in animal models and in humans that our diet is probably one of the major determinants of our gut microbiota. If we have an antibiotic that can cause an abnormality or what we call dysbiosis or an abnormal biosis but from a day to day basis probably the one thing that we do that affects our gut microbiota the most is what we eat. And studies have shown long term so if we compare specific populations in different countries or people who follow specific diets like vegetarians versus people who eat meat that there's distinct differences not only in who's there but in the types of genes that they express and that leads to the types of metabolites so that's another way our gut microbiota communicates with us by producing chemicals that communicate with the host things I will call short chain fatty acids or other metabolites. So even short term studies it was a very nice study out of Harvard where they put volunteers on either a high plant based or high animal based diet for a week and even in that short period of time they could show that there were large shifts in particularly the enzymes and the metabolites but as soon as the subjects went back to their normal diet their microbiota tended to shift back to where they were before. That's very interesting yes and so with regard to yogurt how do cultured foods and of course in particular yogurt affect our gut microbiota. So a lot of the recent studies have investigated some of the probiotic strains that we see in yogurt the literature is not completely clear what I found in reviewing the literature is people don't seem to be studying standard yogurt that much they want to be adding other bacteria so the standard yogurt has a lactobacillus bulgaricus and streptococcus thermophilus big words and those don't necessarily seem to proliferate in our gut so what we find with most people is when we're consuming yogurt we can find that yogurt being excreted but as soon as they stop consuming the yogurt those tend to go away. There are other strains of bifidobacteria for example bifidobacteria is very common in infants but not so much in adults and it's considered a beneficial bacteria along with lactobacillus there's some of those that actually can colonize in the gut and persist and those will have even more dramatic effects you know what I what I really want to say about this area is we really need a lot more research and research just in populations where we can do interventions to see you know before and after a yogurt intervention but also what we call like a randomized control trial so that if a patient or a participant doesn't know whether they're getting yogurt you know with active cultures or yogurt without active cultures because that's another permutation that sometimes the yogurt or still has bacteria that's still alive and in other cases they've been heat treated and aren't alive and so I think this is an incredibly exciting area of research but as we review it we realize we really have work to do you know to understand the short and long-term effects and then also the mechanisms or how these beneficial effects are occurring yes it is an exciting time right now in terms of gut health and yogurt's implications in it so thank you very much no this is my pleasure thank you