Homemade Yogurt Nutrition Info

The answer is that they are not much different.

During fermentation, some of the milk's lactose is converted by bacteria into protein and other substances. The amount of conversion is pretty insignificant in terms of calories and grams of macronutrients. The most important effects are the changes in taste and consistency and the presence of live bacteria. Usually many of the bacteria survive the highly acid stomach fluids to reach the small intestine where they continue digesting lactose.

Fitday.com gives the info below for a cup of each, which may be surprising at first. However, commercial yogurt tends to be more dense than milk, as you might see if you make it at home: a cup of milk gives you some watery fluid floating on top of less than a cup of yogurt.

Food              | Calories | Fat  | Carbohydrates | Protein
------------------+----------+------+---------------+--------
Whole Milk Yogurt | 149 kcal | 8.0g | 11.4g         | 8.5g
Whole Milk        | 146 kcal | 7.9g | 11.0g         | 7.9g

The answer, like all good answers, is that it depends. Do you remove anything when you make homemade yogurt from the vessel in which you make it (crock pot, pot, yogurt maker, etc)? When I make yogurt I have to pour off some water that floats to the top, which means there are more nutrients in each serving than there would be if I divided the original 2% milk by the same amount as I do my yogurt.

During the production of yogurt the bacteria will be eating some of the sugars in the milk while they do their work, but the difference in nutrition is fairly small.

General nutrition facts for whole milk yogurt and whole milk indicate that there is a pretty negligible difference between the two. In general you can take the calorie contents of your ingredients, divide by the number of servings, and get calories per serving.

In terms of nutrition the biggest difference is the live cultures that are in your homemade yogurt. The current general consensus is that these live cultures are good for a variety of things in the human body.

lactose in milk does not get transformed into protein. When used by the bacteria it converts into lactic acid and other organic acids and metabolites.

Fermentation causes a significant reduction in lactose. Commercial yogurt may contain more sugars than milk because they are added to it after the fermentation has been completed. A

As an example a cup of milk usually contains 11-13 g of lactose. A cup of home made yogurt will have up to 4 g per cup depending on how long the fermentation process is.

The other nutrients will not change much. I think the easiest way to calculate nutrition is to keep fat and protein at the same level as milk (if you are using powder milk as well as regular milk, take that into account) and reduce the sugars by a third.

When I make yogurt, I start with 1 liter of whole milk and I add three tablespoons of dry milk and one cup of yogurt from a previous batch. I end up with 7 @ 7 FlOz jars after the process.

Based on the milk nutrition one liter of milk was providing about 600 calories with 44 g of sugars, 32 g of fat and same 32 g of protein.

The milk powder (3 Tablespoons) were providing about 65 calories, 10 g of sugars, 7 g of protein and no fat.

As I add a whole 7 FlOz yogurt to make 7 new yogurts, pretty much the milk and milk powder will make 7 FlOz yogurts. So each yogurt will have 1/6 of the calories, protein and fat that the fresh milk and powder milk contribute.

Regarding sugars they will be probably one third of the original amount as the other 2/3 will be converted into lactic acid.

Lactic acid also contributes calories, so the total amount of calories does not vary much.

So, finally!!!! what is the nutritional value for my home made yogurt (per 7 FlOz). 110 calories, about 3 g of sugars, 5.34 g of fat and 6.5 g of protein.

Hope this helps. Sorry if it was too long or conversome, but I tried to give as much information on how the calculation was done.

Yogurt making is a pretty gentle process - the bacteria involved do consume some of the natural milk sugars (and then excrete lactic acid, which in turn curdles the milk solids which thickens the texture) - but the carbohydrate drop is pretty minimal. If I was making yogurt from store-bought milk, I'd use the nutrition information on the side of the carton.