While most dairy items fall outside the allowable list of Paleo/Primal foods, yogurt somewhat toes the line. By pure Paleo standards, sure — it’s very unlikely that Grok fermented milk to create his own yogurt. But can it be of any benefit to us? Absolutely! Now just to clarify I’m not speaking about any sweetened Yoplait, Dannon or the other HFCS-filled varieties and if it comes prepackaged with “fruit on the bottom”, it’s garbage.

Greek food booth at the farmer's market

Some of the best yogurt is from the Greek Fage brand. If you buy some, make sure you get Fage Total and not the 2% or worse the fat-free! The saturated fats that you’ll get are quite essential as we’ve covered before. On top of that, you get a great dose of beneficial bacteria. You’ll find it to be extremely rich and creamy and can fill in really well as a sour cream substitute. I prefer mine mixed with some fresh berries.

Recently one of our favorite sites, Marks Daily Apple, had a great sarcastic post about all the junk yogurt with big advertising budgets like Activia, etc. In it he mentioned finding some imported full-fat Greek yogurt made from sheep’s milk. I searched around and finally located some at the local farmer’s market. This tasted better than any of the Fage or “Greek style” yogurt I’ve purchased at Trader Joe’s. One of the benefits of sheep’s milk is that sheep are much more commonly grass-fed as opposed to cow’s milk.

A tub of the good stuff

Oh and for those of you who’ll eat yogurt but are making faces at the thought of sheep’s milk, what makes the thought of suckling at a cow’s teat more appetizing? Granted, most of us were raised on drinking cow’s milk but it’s just as “weird” as drinking sheep’s milk when you really think about it.

WOD 4.22.10

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