Sunday, February 23, 2014

You're Better Off Not Knowing How Your Food Is Made

At least in some instances:
Baby poop sausages definitely sound disgusting. But in reality, they’re not nearly as gross as you’d think based on these sensationalistic news stories. In fact, you have probably already consumed foods or supplements made with a bacterial strain derived from human feces without even knowing it.
“Some probiotics—not all, but some—are isolated from feces,” says Mary Ellen Sanders, a consultant in probiotic microbiology. (Probiotics, recall, are any bacteria that confer health benefits.) Sanders gave the example of Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG, a probiotic that was isolated from human feces in 1983 and is now widely used in products such as “buttermilks, yoghurts, milk, fruit drinks, ‘daily dose’ drinks and fermented whey-based drinks.” (Incidentally, the Spanish researchers who made sausage with infant fecal bacteria compared it to sausage made with L. rhamnosus GG, which they classified as a commercial probiotic strain.) “It used to be a tenet of the field of probiotics that you wanted to isolate [bacteria] from human sources, because the thinking has always been that that would increase the likelihood that they would have beneficial physiological effects in humans,” says Sanders.
And there’s no reason to be skeeved out either by the yogurt in your fridge that contains L. rhamnosus GG or the sausages containing those newly isolated infant fecal bacteria.
Like beef enhanced with pink slime, sometimes taste tops how it's made.  Of course, I've never actually eaten yogurt, so maybe I shouldn't say too much.

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