New Delhi: Curd may help fight chronic inflammation, a physiological condition linked to multiple health disorders, including arthritis, cardiovascular disease and inflammatory bowel disease, medical researchers said on Monday, releasing fresh evidence of yoghurt's health benefits.

They said their study sought to explore the idea that yoghurt - long recognised as a stomach-friendly food - may help reduce inflammation by improving the integrity of the intestinal lining and preventing pro-inflammatory molecules from crossing into the bloodstream.

Their findings, published on Monday in the Journal of Nutrition, also suggest that yoghurt when used as an appetiser just before high-fat and high-calorie meals appears to lower the metabolic stress associated with inflammation in the hours after the meals.

"The results indicate that the consumption of yoghurt may have a general anti-inflammatory effect," said Brad Bolling, assistant professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study.

The study which tested yoghurt as an appetiser before a large high-fat and high-carbohydrate meal - containing two sausage muffins and two hash browns and delivering 900 calories - also indicated that yoghurt increased the pace of reductions in post-meal blood glucose levels.

"Eating eight ounces (220g) of low-fat yoghurt before a meal is a feasible strategy to improve post-meal metabolism and thus may help reduce the risk of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases," Bolling said in a media release issued by the university.

In their study, Bolling and his colleagues asked 60 women volunteers to eat 340g low-fat yoghurt every day for nine weeks and offered 60 other women a non-dairy pudding to serve as the control. They found that those who ate the yoghurt had on average lower levels of biomarkers of inflammation, including a molecule called tumour necrosis factor-alpha.

"These results are not surprising - they add evidence to earlier hints that yoghurt works against chronic inflammation," said Balamurugan Ramadass, associate professor of biochemistry at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar, who was not associated with the US study but is himself exploring the benefits of curd and its ingredients.

"Curd is a mix of friendly bacteria such as lactobacilli and their metabolites, or their waste products, which actually include anti-bacterial compounds and other micronutrients," Ramadass told The Telegraph. "The exact molecular mechanisms through which these compounds exert an anti-inflammatory response is a topic of research."

Bolling's study did not identify which compounds in yoghurt were responsible for the lowered levels of biomarkers such as TNF-alpha.

"The goal is to identify the components and then get human evidence to support their mechanism of action in the body," he said. "Ultimately, we would like to see these components optimised in foods, particularly in medical situations where it is important to inhibit inflammation through the diet."

Doctors currently prescribe medications such as aspirin, naproxen, or steroids such as prednisone to patients to control chronic inflammation. But such medications can sometimes have side-effects.