I’ve got a question here today from a patient in England. Is Yakult any good for thrush?
Well, let’s first examine what Yakult is. Yakult is a small drink you can buy from the supermarket. It comes in about an 80 mil shot in a small plastic container generally with red writing on it. It contains up to 30 billion live probiotic organisms per container, which is quite a lot, Lactobacillus casei shirota strain. It was developed in 1935 by a Japanese doctor, so it’s been around for about 80 years now and it’s proven to be a reasonably good drink.
The question is asked, can it be used for thrush? I’m not a big fan of Yakult for a couple of reasons. I’m just going to read out the ingredients and you make up your own mind. It contains water, sugar (sucrose), skim milk powder, glucose (another sugar), calcium lactate, permitted flavors, goodness knows what these permitted flavors are, and a few B vitamins, B3, niacin, pyridoxine, B6, B12 and Vitamin D. That’s all okay, but I’m not happy about the sugars in this product. Why would you put sugar and glucose in a probiotic drink?
According to the website, they put it in there because it would be too sour to taste. And they put this in there to sweeten the flavor up a bit. So they say a little bit of sugar is fine to have in a drink like this. It takes away the sourness, but also feeds the beneficial bacteria. Unfortunately, it feeds Candida as well, so it’s got sugar in there.
I’m going to give you the thumbs down for Yakult for thrush. I don’t think you should have it. I think maybe for certain cases of traveler’s diarrhea it might be okay, but for a yeast infection, I’ll not recommend you take Yakult in. There are plenty of other good probiotics on the market that you can take that don’t contain sugars. You don’t really want to have any added sugar in there. And the Japanese have a tendency to put sugar in a lot of things to sweeten it up. This is one of the reasons why people like sushi, the noy rolled up with rice, because rice is often cooked up and they add small amounts of caster sugar in there to sweeten it.
I don’t recommend that you have Yakult if you have a yeast infection. Thanks for your inquiry.