A yogurt drink is good for you when it is real fermented dairy with live cultures and the added sugar is kept in check.
Plenty of bottles sold as yogurt drinks in Nigeria are closer to sweetened flavoured milk, and they are the reason the category has a mixed reputation. The label tells you which one you are holding.
If you already know what you are looking for, the Zayith drinks range is made in Lagos from real dairy and real fruit, and kept cold to your door. The rest of this is how to judge any bottle on the shelf.
Are yogurt drinks healthy?
Two things decide it. The drink has to be genuinely fermented dairy carrying live cultures, and the added sugar has to be low enough that you are not drinking a dessert.
Get both right and a yogurt drink does the same work a bowl of yogurt does, in a format you can finish on the way to work.
Get either one wrong and you are buying something else. A drink built on milk, sugar and fruit flavouring never fermented anything, so there were never any live cultures in it to lose.
A properly fermented drink loaded with sugar still carries the cultures, but you take on the sugar along with them. Neither is a disaster, and neither is what most people think they are buying.
What a good one actually gives you
Fermentation is the thing that separates yogurt from milk, and the bacteria that do the fermenting are the same ones that reach your gut.
The US National Yogurt Association sets its “live and active cultures” seal at 100 million cultures per gram at manufacture, a benchmark Harvard cites.
That is a US industry standard rather than a Nigerian labelling rule, so treat it as a yardstick for what the phrase should mean.
The practical consequence is simpler: heat treatment applied after fermentation kills the cultures, which is why some shelf-stable drinks have none left in them by the time you buy one.
Then there is the dairy itself. Protein is the part of a snack that decides whether you are hungry again in forty minutes, and USDA data puts plain unstrained yogurt at roughly 10g of protein per 200g. A drinking yogurt is lighter than a strained Greek tub, and how much lighter depends on how much liquid and sugar the maker adds back.
The same USDA record gives about 183mg of calcium per 100g.
Can you drink Yogurt everyday?
For most people this is a reasonable habit rather than something to be careful with. Fermented dairy is ordinary food. Two caveats though: if you are lactose intolerant, fermentation reduces lactose without removing it, so test your own tolerance rather than assuming; and if the drink is a sweetened one, daily use is where the sugar adds up.
That is the argument for keeping an unsweetened or lightly sweetened option in the rotation.
The weight question follows from the same place. A yogurt drink will not make you gain weight on its own, because nothing does; total intake decides that. A modest, protein-carrying serving swapped in for a soft drink or a pastry usually moves your day in the other direction.
Where the worry comes from is real though, because some sweetened drinking yogurts carry a lot of added sugar, and two or three a day stops being modest. The ingredient list is where you find out.
For the longer version, see our guide to Greek yogurt for weight loss.
Also, there is no window in which yogurt works and outside which it stops. What changes is the job it does. In the morning the protein and the volume together take the edge off mid-morning hunger. In the evening it is a light option when you want something light before bed.
If you train, the useful rule is to get protein reasonably soon afterwards, and a drink is an easy way to manage that when you have no appetite for a meal yet.
Yogurt drinks and children
They work well for lunchboxes, which is most of why parents buy them. A single bottle is easy for a child to carry and drink without a spoon, and a real yogurt drink is fermented dairy rather than a fruit-flavoured squash.
Sugar is the thing to watch, since children’s yogurt drinks are usually where brands sweeten hardest. Read the label the same way you would for yourself.
For lunchboxes the 250ml bottles are the size that actually fits, and the mixed pack lets you keep more than one flavour in the fridge so nobody is stuck with the one they like least.
For babies and toddlers the guidance is different enough to be worth reading properly, and our guide to Greek yogurt for babies covers it.
How to tell a real yogurt drink from a flavoured milk drink
This is what decides whether any of the above applies to the bottle in your hand. Five checks, all of them on the label.
- Is it fermented, or is it milk with flavour? Look for yogurt or cultured milk named in the ingredients, and live cultures mentioned somewhere. If the front of the bottle says “yogurt flavoured” rather than “yogurt”, that word is doing a lot of work.
- Where does the fruit come from? Real fruit appears as fruit or fruit puree in the ingredient list. “Flavouring” does not. A mango drink that tastes like a sweet with a mango label usually reads that way on the ingredients too.
- Where does sugar sit in the ingredient list? Ingredients are listed heaviest first, so sugar in second or third position tells you more than any claim on the front.
- Is dairy doing the work, or are thickeners? A long list of gums and stabilisers usually means the body of the drink is being built rather than being there already.
- Does it need refrigeration? A drink that sits on a warm shelf for months has generally been treated in a way that leaves few or no live cultures. Cold chain is a reasonable proxy for whether they survived.
A drink that clears the first and last of those is real fermented dairy. One that fails both is a soft drink with dairy in it, which is a legitimate thing to want and is not the same purchase.
The Zayith yogurt drinks
Ours are made in Lagos from real dairy and real fruit, without thickeners standing in for body, and kept cold from production to your door. Mango uses ripe fruit rather than mango flavouring, so it tastes the way mango season tastes.
Mixed Berries is built on mulberries and black currants, which is why it reads fruit-forward and a little tart instead of straightforwardly sweet. Vanilla is mild and smooth, the one to reach for alongside a meal.
Sizes run from a 250ml bottle that fits a school bag through to 10L for households that go through it steadily. If you would rather not commit a whole order to one flavour, the mixed pack lets you split it across flavours. The full drinks range is here.
Frequently asked questions
Is yogurt a drink or a food?
Both, depending on the type. Set yogurt and strained Greek yogurt are thick enough to need a spoon. Drinking yogurt is the same fermented dairy with more of its liquid left in, so it pours. The fermentation is identical.
Do yogurt drinks need to be refrigerated?
The ones with live cultures in them do. A drink that keeps on a warm shelf for months has usually been treated in a way that leaves few cultures behind.
The short version
A yogurt drink is worth buying when it is real fermented dairy, made with real fruit, and not carrying a soft drink’s worth of sugar. That is a label question, and it takes about ten seconds to answer in the shop. For the wider case on what yogurt does for you, read our guide to the health benefits of eating yogurt.
