Browse evidence-based analysis of health-related claims and assertions
This study only looked at what happened after one snack, so we don’t know if eating yogurt every afternoon helps with weight loss over time.
Descriptive
Even though the yogurt had more protein, it didn’t make women feel significantly fuller than the crackers at the 90-minute mark.
Causal
The yogurt snack was much less dense in calories per gram than the chocolate or crackers, which might help explain why it kept people fuller longer.
Even though the yogurt snack wasn’t as tasty as the chocolate or crackers, it still made women less hungry and made them eat less later.
Women ate about 100 fewer calories at dinner after eating yogurt than after chocolate, but this difference was just shy of being statistically significant.
The yogurt snack made women wait about 20 minutes longer before eating dinner than the crackers did, but this difference was close to being statistically significant.
Chocolate and crackers, even though one is sugary and the other is salty, had almost the same effect on hunger and how much women ate later.
Even though the yogurt snack made women feel fuller at one point after eating, overall they didn’t feel significantly more full than after eating chocolate or crackers.
Even though a yogurt snack and a cracker snack had the same calories, women ate less at dinner after the yogurt—yet they didn’t feel less hungry than after the crackers.
After eating a protein-rich yogurt snack, women ate about 100 fewer calories at dinner than after eating a chocolate snack, meaning they didn’t overeat later to make up for the snack.
Women who eat a high-protein yogurt snack in the afternoon wait about half an hour longer before feeling hungry enough to eat dinner than those who eat a chocolate snack.
When healthy women eat a protein-rich yogurt snack in the afternoon instead of a chocolate bar, they feel less hungry later on, especially about an hour and a half after eating.
Yogurt with cereal gave young women three times more protein and only a quarter of the fiber compared to coconut cereal — even though both meals had almost the same calories and carbs.
Quantitative
Young women who skipped breakfast ended up eating less overall in the next two hours than those who ate either yogurt or coconut cereal — which seems surprising, but the study found it.
Whether young women ate yogurt with cereal or coconut-based cereal for breakfast, both made them feel less hungry and eat less in the next two hours than if they hadn’t eaten breakfast at all.
After eating yogurt with cereal, young women’s bodies released almost twice as much insulin as after eating coconut-based cereal, which likely helped lower their blood sugar without making them hungrier later.
Mechanistic
When young women ate yogurt with cereal for breakfast, their blood sugar stayed much lower after eating than when they ate a coconut-based cereal breakfast.
At first, the mice on the fatty diet ate the same amount of food by weight as the others, but still got more calories because fat is energy-dense.
Even normal mice have a more complicated daily rhythm of stress hormone than just one peak—it has two peaks, and this is true for all mice, not just those on a fatty diet.
Even if they eat the same amount of food by weight, mice on a fatty diet take in way more calories because fat has more energy than other nutrients.
The daily pattern of stress hormone in the mice’s poop is more complicated than just one peak—it has two peaks, and this complexity changes with diet.
Even though the mice on the fatty diet got heavier, the increase in stress hormone in their fur wasn’t linked to how fat they became—it seems the diet itself caused the change.
Correlational
Mice on a fatty diet not only weigh more, but also have a lot more body fat and a higher BMI, meaning they’re much fatter than mice on a normal diet.
The time of day when the stress hormone peaks shifts from daytime to nighttime in mice eating a high-fat diet, which is the opposite of what normally happens.