Today’s Headline of the Day is from Scientific American, atop an article by Elie Dolgin:
Mice That Eat Yogurt Have Larger Testicles
The article itself begins:
Last summer a team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology set out to better understand the effects of yogurt on obesity. They were following up on the results of a long-term study from the Harvard School of Public Health that had suggested yogurt, more than any other food, helped to prevent age-related weight gain. The M.I.T. team, led by cancer biologist Susan Erdman [pictured here] and evolutionary geneticist Eric Alm, wanted to replicate the work in mice. The researchers took a group of 40 males and 40 females and either fed the animals a high-fat, low-fiber, low-nutrient diet meant to mimic junk food or fed them standard mouse meals. They then supplemented half of each diet group with vanilla-flavored yogurt. Their goal was to understand how a probiotic diet affects rates of obesity and its related complications, including cancer. But “the most entertaining aspects of all this were things we didn’t anticipate,” Erdman says….
(Thanks to investigator Elaine Snell for bringing this to our attention.)