University of Wisconsin PhD student Cecilia Westbrook made yoghurt using bacterial culture from her vagina, and she ate it. She made the yoghurt after she realised no one has probed the potential of bacterial cultures inside the female genital.

There are, however, so much research on good and bad bacteria, reports Science Alert. One example is faecal transplant, which involves taking faeces from someone’s colon and putting the faecal matter in another person to heal the gut.

Newborn babies are also being smeared with vaginal fluid to give them healthy bacteria. To harvest her bacteria, Westbrook got a wooden spoon and placed it inside her vagina and then placed it in a bowl of milk. She left the spoon with the vaginal bacteria on the milk overnight.

Huffington Post reports that Westbrook used three bowls. The first had yoghurt with a traditional starter culture, the second used plain milk and the third was the one with her vaginal bacteria.

According to Motherboard, which first reported on Westbrook’s experiment done in February, the taste of the first batch of yoghurt was sour, tangy and almost tingly on the tongue, similar to the flavour of Indian yoghurt. She added some blueberries to the yoghurt.

While Rosanne Hertzberger, a Dutch microbiologist at the Washington University School of Medicine, who studies vaginal bacteria, said Westbrook’s experiment is clever, she warned that it may not be a good idea because vaginal bacteria also has a lot of bad bacteria.

Actually, Lactobacillus, the dominant vaginal bacteria, has the same genus as the vaginal Lactobacilli. Both produce a lot of lactic acid, explains Hertzberger. However, commercial yoghurt is made by combining the subspecies of Streptococcis themophilus and Lactobacillus bulgaricus, she adds.

Hertzberger modified Westbrook’s experiment by using a different Lactobacili from healthy pregnant women. She tested eight bacteria strains of which only one was successful in acidifying the milk where it was placed. The product was chunky sour milk with a lot of precipitated milk protein. But the microbiologist was wise enough not to taste it.

With her experiment, she reached the conclusion that the yoghurt that Westbrook produced could have contained other bacteria possibly from the spoon, the air, kitchen counter, under her fingernails, and of course, from her vagina.

She concedes that it still sounds gross but pointed out that there could be some benefits from vaginal bacteria to heal yeast infection or bacterial vaginosis.

To contact the writer, email: v.hernandez@ibtimes.com.au

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