But now, a pair of new studies suggest there might be something about yogurt after all. In the female subjects, at least, it appears to help with markers of inflammation—and that, in turn, can keep other types of diseases at bay.

Inflammation, the body’s immune response to invaders, can be a good thing—it’s how our wounds heal, for example. But a steady, low-level simmer of inflammation in the body is associated with diseases like asthma and arthritis, as well as obesity, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease.

“People who are obese have chronic inflammation, which is why there are diseases associated with obesity, like cardiac disease,” says Caroline Childs, a lecturer in nutrition at the University of Southampton. “So if you can reduce the inflammation, you might have less associated diseases.”

Bradley Bolling, a food-science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, decided to put some women on a yogurt-heavy diet. He and his colleagues had 60 women, half of whom were obese, eat 12 ounces of low-fat yogurt every day for nine weeks. A control group ate a non-dairy pudding during that same time. Then, they measured the levels of proteins excreted by immune cells to determine how much inflammation was in these women’s bodies.

In a study released late last year in the British Journal of Nutrition, Bolling and his colleagues found that the yogurt-eating group saw improvements in some markers of inflammation. (And, for some of the biomarkers, only the obese group improved.)

Meanwhile, for an article in the Journal of Nutrition, which was published last week, his team gave the women an “eating challenge,” feeding them a high-fat meal of Jimmy Dean sausage-and-egg sandwiches and hash browns. The point was to see how much inflammation their bodies showed in the immediate aftermath. Typically, our bodies get slightly inflamed after a meal as our immune systems try to sort out whether what we ate was just poison, or not.

The group that ate the yogurt before the fatty meal showed less inflammation over the next few hours. In the obese participants, there also appeared to be a faster return to normal blood-sugar levels after the meal, if they’d eaten a yogurt first.

It’s not really clear how the yogurt was reducing the inflammation. Its “live and active cultures” might have been strengthening the lining of the gut, thus preventing pro-inflammatory molecules inside the gut from leaking out. (Once they’re out, they can start signaling cells and increasing inflammation throughout the body.) Or, they might have been preventing the immune cells from releasing the inflammatory signals in the first place.

Past research doesn’t offer us much of a clue how, or if, this works. A couple of small studies from recent years have found probiotic yogurt did lead to slight anti-inflammatory effects, but a Chinese meta-analysis last year found that probiotics were pretty limited in their ability to help rheumatoid-arthritis patients.