by KAREN INGE, leading Australian Dietitian & Nutritionist

Look after your yoghourt and your yoghourt will look after you

Yoghourt is one of those ancient, nurturing foods that can help look after your body from top to toe.  Regularly enjoying Jalna yoghourts with essential nutrients, will help keep your skin, hair and nails in shining form and calcium helps protect the strength of your bones for years to come.  But Jalna Yoghourts are also your friend in the fridge for those times when things are not running so smoothly. 

The aBc cultures in Jalna dairy foods are probiotics that can help restore your inner balance, particularly after a bout of an upset tum.  

Care for your food

When we think of foods like yoghourt and their effect on health, we generally consider nutritional value. However, the first point of call should be food safety. Australia produces some of the safest food in the world, yet it's estimated 1.5 million Australians suffer a bout of food poisoning each year.

Food poisoning results from eating food which is contaminated by bacteria or toxins from bacteria, natural toxins in foods, or excessive levels of pesticides or additives. The body usually reacts quickly within 6-12 hours after eating the contaminated food, but symptoms may appear even later. The most common symptoms of food poisoning are vomiting, diarrhoea, stomach cramps and fever.

Food safety tips

This might all seem somewhat scary, but most cases can be prevented by safe food handling practices.

The key issue for food safety is to keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Bacteria multiply rapidly in temperatures between 5-60ºC (i.e. cool to under boiling temperature). For example, one bacterium can multiply to greater than two million in seven hours at these temperatures. For most of us, safe food handling begins in the supermarket and continues in the home.

Shopping

• Check the use-by or best-before date on yoghourts and all perishable foods
• Choose hot foods (such as rotisserie chickens) and refrigerated and frozen foods last so that they don't sit in your trolley for too long.

• Do not leave groceries sitting in your car and keep a car fridge or cool pack in your car for frozen and refrigerated foods.

At home

• Keep your fridge at 4°C or less and your freezer at approximately -18°C. 
• Thaw meat, poultry and fish in the fridge, not on the kitchen sink. 
• Cook thawed meats immediately, especially if thawed in the microwave. Do not re-freeze unless cooked first. 
• Refrigerate leftovers or cooked food within an hour (let them cool in the fridge, not on the bench and cover with plastic wrap). 
• Do not reheat anything twice and use leftovers within a day. 

• And don't forget to wash your hands!

Inner balance

Many factors can upset our normal balance including what we eat, our busy and stressful lives or simply getting older.  Consuming probiotic dairy foods like the Jalna range, which contain aBc cultures may help to maintain or re-establish the correct balance of friendly bacteria.

Research indicates that to gain the most benefits we need 100 million live bacteria or more per day. There are over 200 million of each of the three strains (aBc) of live friendly bacteria or probiotics in every serve of all Jalna Yoghourt and Yoghourt On The Go and Vitalize – that’s over 600 million in every 200g of Jalna Yoghourt or Yoghourt On The Go or Vitalize.