 While there was no association between total dairy products and incidence of diabetes, low-fat fermented dairy products were inversely associated with a 24% reduced risk of diabetes. And specifically yoghurt made up somewhere around 87% of the low-fat fermented dairy products, and that was associated with a 28% reduced risk of diabetes. This was the conclusion of the Epic Norfolk II study presented at the Second World Yogurt Summit, which took place during the 2014 Experimental Biology Meeting. This 11-year prospective study followed healthy people to see who developed diabetes according to their diet. A unique feature of this study is that dietary details were available on 4,000 individuals who had filled out 7-day food diaries. The fact that fermented dairy products in particular were associated with a reduced risk probably points to additional things that happened to dairy during the fermentation process. So dairy has a huge amount of nutrient density, it's a good type of food, dairy as a whole, with vitamins, minerals, possibly the good type of saturated fatty acids in terms of 15 and 17 carbon chain-length fatty acids. But additionally, fermentation probably is giving us the advantage of probiotic effects. That's likely to play a part. The beneficial effect of yoghurt on cardiovascular risk factors was also highlighted in the Helena study, which evaluated the nutritional and behavioral patterns of 3,000 European adolescents. In the adolescent population, we did a study that is called the Helena study, Healthy Lifestyle in Europe by Nutrition in Adolescents, in which we identify an association between the consumption of yoghurt and yoghurt-based drinks and also additionally milk products with cardiovascular diseases risk factors. And dairy products would have a protective effect. Yogurt consumption was associated with a reduction in BMI and waste circumference. In fact, we had four groups within the dairy category and we detected associations only with the first two ones. That means milk, buttermilk and yoghurt-based drinks and white cheese. At the 11-year follow-up evaluation of the Framingham Heart Study Offspring cohort, dairy consumption appeared associated with a favorable effect on another cardiovascular risk factor, blood pressure. The main finding was that dairy, particularly low-fat and fat-free dairy, higher intakes resulted in a slower increase in blood pressure and systolic blood pressure with time. In the systolic blood pressure, you saw that those with the lowest intakes or less than one serving per week of low-fat and fat-free dairy increased the blood pressure about 1.1 millimeters of mercury per year, whereas the participants who had higher intakes of dairy more than three servings per week increased the blood pressure annually at a rate of only about 0.75 millimeters of mercury per year. That difference may seem small, but that's a 30 percent difference in the rate of increase in blood pressure over time.