Yogurt

I WAS doing some online research the other day and I happened to find myself on a page filled with Turkish proverbs (don’t ask how I got there). Some of the proverbs make sense, such as “a knife wound heals, but a tongue wound festers” which means that the wounds words inflict sometimes hurt more than wounds that are physically inflicted. Other proverbs however, make less sense if they’re interpreted literally—such as “a liar’s candle only burns till evening” or “every man has his own way of eating yogurt.”

That second one made me think. Surely this means “to each his own” but why yogurt specifically? Was there some cultural connection the Turks had with yogurt? So I dug deeper—and I looked into yogurt’s long and surprisingly mysterious history.

Yogurt might seem like an odd topic for some but it can actually be interesting if you read enough about it. Nobody knows who invented yogurt, but its earliest sources indicate that it came from India or Persia. It was also mentioned that Abraham himself owed his longevity to a daily consumption of yogurt.

And that’s not all—when the French ruler Francis I was suffering a bout of explosive diarrhea which no French doctor could cure, his friend Suleiman the Magnificent, the sultan of the Ottoman Empire, sent him his personal physician to help the French king, and the physician fed him yogurt.

The king was magically cured, presumably sent all his doctors to be executed, and then spread news of the miraculous medicine throughout France. Ever since Francis’s proclamation, yogurt has been attributed to have benefits to good health and longevity.

Yogurt is more beneficial than milk because of its high vitamin content, and those who are lactose intolerant (90 percent of Asians are at least mildly lactose intolerant, according to a Brazilian study) can handle yogurt better than milk. It also tastes great frozen. Not only that, but it’s really easy to make.

Now this may sound odd, but you need yogurt to make yogurt. In this case, you can use Yakult since it’s almost the same thing (same vitamins and minerals as yogurt). Basically all you need is a couple of pots, your starter yogurt, a thermometer and a heating pad. Detailed instructions can be found on makeyourownyogurt.com.

When you finish making your yogurt, you may actually want to share it with your friends or sell it to earn a bit of profit for really low capital. As they say in Turkey – iyi shanslar!