Youngsters who started the day with the yoghurt drink were almost 20 per cent less likely than their classmates to suffer an infection, including ear and sinus infections.
Probiotic drinks have become extremely popular with consumers in recent years.
The latest research, carried out by Georgetown University in Washington, and funded by Actimel’s makers, Danone, also found that the drink reduced rates of other common infections, including the flu and diarrhoea, which have shown to be very common with children.
More than 600 children aged between three and six were given either the drink or a placebo as part of the trial.
However, despite suffering from fewer infections children who were given the drinks still took as many days off school as their classmates.
" … To our knowledge this is the largest probiotic clinical trial conducted in Americas and provides much needed data," said the authors of the study, which is published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
"We studied a functional food, not a medicinal product; parents will thus feed their children without any physician input and we felt it was best to assess [the drink] under similar conditions."
Probiotic yoghurts have shown to be an at-home wellness product that parents can freely feed their children without prescription from a physician. And if a simple product such as this provides children with reduced infections, all the more welcome!
Source and thanks to www.telegraph.co.uk.
