Spending Money on Activia® or DanActive™? Try Kefir!!

By Marcie Barnes


There 's something called Kefir which has been around for thousands of years and it offers the same (if not more) benefits as the new products on the market such as Activia® or DanActive™.

What annoys me about Dannon's advertising campaigns are claims such as: "Specialists at Dannon® selected Bifidus Regularis™ for Activia® because it survives passage through the digestive tract, arriving in the colon as a living culture." - Well, they didn't exactly select it, they trademarked the words so they could be the "only people in the world" using it. Bifidus Regularis was trademarked in the US by Compagnie Gervais Danone - which seems to be the parent company of Dannon in Europe.

Another Dannon product, DanActives Immunity, claims "The probiotic culture L. casei Immunitas™ is, in comparison to other yogurt cultures, more resistant to the stomach acid and is therefore getting in a high concentration in the intestine, where about 70% of the body's immune cells are located. Once there, DanActive with L. casei Immunitas™ can help strengthen our body’s defenses." Same thing - another trademarked term, and all you are probably getting is a well-known strain of Lactobacillius Casei.

So, what do you get when you drink kefir? Here is the list of probiotic strains contained in each bottle:

• Lactobacillius Lactis
• Lactobacillus Rhamnosus
• Streptococcus Diacetylactis
• Lactobacillus Plantarum
• Lactobacillius Casei
• Saccharomyces Florentinus
• Leuconostoc Cremoris
• Bifidobacterium Longum
• Bifidobacterium Breve
• Lactobacillus Acidophilus

See the chart to compare nutritional information and price. As you can see you get a lot more bang for your buck with kefir. There are sweetened/flavored varieties available which would have more sugar, but Dannon does not give a lower-sugar alternative like kefir does. Two cons to kefir: it's not readily available in major groceries (but is carried at WholeFoods and the like, of course) and the consistency may take some getting used to - it's basically a cross between milk and yogurt in thickness. Try it!