Oh my god. Can't we women just have one thing to ourselves without a pair of giant testicles swooping in and making it all about them? Last week I found out they're making push-up bras for your nutsack. Now it turns out that yogurt—our precious lady-nectar!—might make men's testicle-balls bigger, spermier, and covered in lustrous, downy fur. Seriously, yogurt? Et tu? What's next—are they going to announce that watching House Hunters International makes your semen taste like fondue? Can we not have ONE THING?
MIT researchers, exploring the relationship between yogurt consumption and obesity, fed a group of 80 mice either a junk food diet or a standard diet, supplementing half of each group with yogurt. As expected, the junk-food mice wound up fatter and slower than the standard-diet mice, and the mice that ate the standard diet plus yogurt were the slimmest of all. This suggests that incorporating probiotics into one's diet can help with weight loss. Also (favorite sentence): "the scientists noticed that the yogurt-eating mice were incredibly shiny." Sparkle, you special little mouse! Sparkle!
But what the researchers didn't anticipate was this: Those mices' balls got HUGE:
Then the researchers spotted something particular about the males: they projected their testes outward, which endowed them with a certain "mouse swagger," Erdman says. On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.
Oh my god, mouse swagger.
Great. So now yogurt—OUR YOGURT—is some sort of magic machismo superfood for men. I can't wait to get hit on by aspiring pick-up artists wearing CamelBaks filled with Yoplait under their zebra-print dusters—mainly because, according to science, it will probably work! I will be helpless before the swagger of these sparkling man-mouses!
But, to be fair, the magic yogurt does have some effect on woman-mice too:
Conversely, females that ate the yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters and weaned those pups with greater success.
So once I get seduced by the Mystery Mouse, I'll be able to successfully whelp hella babies wearing tiny fur top-hats and steampunk novelty goggles. Awesome. Thanks for nothing, yogurt.
Photo credit: (C) icefront / Stockfresh.