 The Yogurt and Nutrition Initiative is a unique collaboration between the American Society for Nutrition, the UK Nutrition Society and the Danone Institute International. And as past president of ASN, I think it's a wonderful opportunity to work with our collaborators and our colleagues. The overall goal of the initiative is to provide the science and the evidence base behind the health benefits of yogurt. And the most important thing was the collaboration with the American Society for Nutrition, because I think that when scientists are collaborating together, that's the optimal way of finding the answers to the questions that we ask. Our presentation tomorrow will be the first global summit. This is a multi-year interaction and we foresee many future summits around the world. So, for example, we already have a session planned at the IUNS meeting in Granada, Spain in September, and we're talking currently about further summits in Argentina and then in Asia, because we really see that there's benefits worldwide. We've known for centuries that yogurt is healthy food. And currently, there's a lot of emerging evidence showing health benefits of yogurt. So our initial goal is really to pull together that information and what is the evidence base for the health benefits of yogurt? Yogurt has its own specific health benefits within this large group of dairy products. And the aims are first to identify the scientific evidence to find the gaps in our knowledge and then to find a way also to communicate all what is known to the public. And so we also hope that the yogurt initiative will spur future research and involve collaborators from around the world. I think some of the most exciting implications are for some of the chronic degenerative diseases that are affecting the developed as well as the developing world. I think that first in science it's the fact that yogurt is a very rich nutrition food product. There are now all kinds of ways to evaluate the nutrition density and I think that we were able to define the specific role that yogurt has in this. And what we've found through that type of a study is that there's an association between habitual yogurt consumption and a reduction in waking as people age as well as better blood pressure parameters. A limitation of epidemiology is that it just shows that there's an association. So one of the aspects of the yogurt initiative would like to do further research so we can understand exactly cause and effect what aspect of yogurt is doing this. Is it yogurt itself or is it other healthy lifestyle behaviors that have also been associated with yogurt consumers? As a nutritionist all of us, me and others, we need to eat a variety of food. We should not limit ourselves to one food product but within the dairy products definitely consuming yogurt and more than it is being consumed currently in the U.S. would be a right thing to do. In the U.S. yogurt has a very positive reputation and people think that it's a healthy food. However we find that most people in the U.S. don't eat nearly as much yogurt as people around the world and on average we're only consuming about a container of yogurt a week whereas in many countries they're consuming one or two containers a day. So part of our goal here is to make the public even more aware as well as healthcare practitioners of the health benefits of yogurt so we can encourage more Americans to enjoy this healthy, delicious food.