A Bulgarian researcher holds a bottle of yoghurt starter culture
produced by private company Lactina Ltd., in the outskirts of the
capital Sofia. Bulgaria proudly claims to have invented yoghurt and
given the world lactobacillus bulgaricus, the bacterium that curdles
milk, and the secret to a long life. It wasn't till the early 1900s
that Russian scientist Ilya Mechnikov, a 1908 Nobel Prize winner,
linked yoghurt with longevity. He compiled statistics from 36 countries
to discover more people lived to the age of 100 in Bulgaria than in any
other - four in every thousand - and attributed this to the regular
consumption of yoghurt. Picture taken April 3, 2003 TO GO WITH FEATURE
BC - BULGARIA - YOGHURT REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov REUTERS

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