We started it as a fun question, but ended up with an article we didn't plan on writing. At @ anabel.entertainment on Instagram, we asked our followers: "If one day a news story about you said: 'Unbelievable! Lived in peace and happiness for 100 years eating only… every day,' what food would it be?"
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The comments started coming in quickly and were as diverse as the people who wrote them. Chocolate, cakes, coffee, pasta, pilaf, croissants. Foods that we love, that comfort us, that we associate with small everyday pleasures. But among all these responses that sounded like a wish list, one word began to be strangely repeated. Yogurt, “in 97% of cases, yogurt”, “yogurt and cheese”, “only yogurt”. Why do so many people imagine themselves living long thanks to yogurt?
Yogurt, unlike chocolate or pasta, does not promise extraordinary taste. It has a pleasant, but somewhat neutral taste. But perhaps this is precisely where its strength lies. It is the food that never betrays you. When your stomach does not feel well, when you have eaten too much, when you do not know what to eat, yogurt is always the safest choice. It contains probiotics, good bacteria that help digestion, and when the body finds something that makes it feel good, it remembers it.
The gut and brain are more connected than we think, and foods that aid digestion often also affect how we feel emotionally. Yogurt is not just “light,” it’s also calming. For some, it’s the food that stabilizes not only the stomach, but also the mood.
Then there's the cultural factor. For many of us, yogurt isn't something that was recently discovered as a "superfood." It's always been there. You grow up with it and, without realizing it, it becomes part of your routine. And routines work, we usually don't abandon them.
At a time when food is often divided between "very healthy, but tasteless" and "very tasty, but unhealthy", yogurt is the right choice. For many people, it is a safe food, one that does not cause dilemmas and does not cause fear of a few extra pounds.
Yogurt may not be the food we'd proudly post on Instagram every day, but it's the one that saves us more often than all the others. It doesn't need marketing, it's just there, doing its job.
So when we imagine a long life, we don't see pasta, chocolate, or croissants, but something simpler, more reliable, more everyday. We see yogurt.
