What is everyones opinion of yakult or other probiotic drinks? Do they really help your immune system?

Never heard of Yakult.

Yakult is made from skimmed milk powder, sugar, water and a live probiotic strain of good bacteria called Lactobacillus casei Shirota.

I used to drink yakult as well as danactive light. I drank the stuff to help regulate my digestive system. I switched over to a probiotic capsule because of the cost. It HAS helped my digestive problems immensely. My doctor recommended I look into probiotics. I take a probiotic pill along with a digestive enzyme so I think for me it is the combo of the two. I had taken one alone in the past and not had any result, but together they are the first thing that has helped me in close to 20 years.

wow, thats pretty amazing. I dont have serious digestive problems but i occaisonally have things, and i get throat infections a lot so id love something t give me a boost. I have been taking yakult light this week (it was on special offer), its about 20kcals. It really tastes disgusting though, should i go for the regular instead? its about 50-60 kcals and has lots of sugar but im trying not to have too much artificial sweetener so maybe it would be better

I never tried the light Yakult so I cannot comment if the regular is any better. Give it a try and if it does help you, probitic capsules are much cheaper in the long run. Of course, then again you'd have to find one that worked for you.

They were giving away samples of Yakult at my gym and I asked about the nutritionals. The tiny bottles (80ml) have 50 calories each. Then the Yakult representative said, in a very excited tone, like somehow this was a good thing, that one bottle has 11g of sugar. At 4 calories per gram, this is basically just liquified sugar.

It's about the same as drinking regular soda. In fact, I think it might be worse. 12 oz of regular classic Coke as 140 calories and 39g of sugar. 12 oz of Yakult would have 222 calories and 48g of sugar. Would you drink regular soda if it had probiotics? Then why drink Yakult? It seems to me that there must be healthier ways to get probiotics.

I have tried the Yakult and found it sickeningly sweet. I now use pro-biotic pills as recommended by my doctor it has made a great difference in my quality of life.

It's a Japanese brand, isn't it? (One of the Japanese big-league baseball teams, I forget its city, is called the Yakult Swallows, they're owned by the Yakult company: a number of J-baseball teams are owned by manufacturing corporations and have the name of the product in their team name.) I've never seen it in Minnesota but maybe it's easier to find on the west coast?

ETA 08.05: Would it be too much to speculate whether in Japanese like in English the word "swallow" means both "a bird" and "what you would *do* with Yakult"?