For your first question: I have no idea! And yeah, fecal bacteria do work their way into the vagina, so it's not like totally out there. But it seems like culturing vaginal flora would make sense but nobody seems to be doing it?!

Cow's milk comes into contact with tons of fecal material. Hence why we pasteurize.

The problem with the yogurt is that there is a lot of stuff living in the average vagina, and we know that some women do harbor pathogenic bacteria in their vaginas. There's always the possibility that when you culture vaginal secretions, the pathogenic bacteria could overrun the good guys and the resulting yogurt…

I feel a collaboration coming on...

thanks! :3

What I do think would be really neat is if you could culture out your own flora and the select non-pathogenic strains and use them as a yogurt starter. That would be much safer and a neat idea for a probiotic.

Again, I can't actually recommend it. Vaginas can contain pathogenic bacteria and you can't ever be certain they won't overrun the good ones if you culture vaginal secretions. I ended up fine but you really are rolling the dice unless you know exactly what's in your vagina.

which is different from vagina yogurt (fermented from milk, a substance specifically to be food) how now?

I think it's about demonstrating that you can culture a probiotic food with flora that are natural to that particular part of the body. We eat yogurt as a probiotic, often for vaginal health, but are we really sure that the flora in yogurt have anything to do with the vagina? I think the ideal would be to culture…

That's a good question! I do get the sense that it's the vagina part that really sent people over the top here. Though people seem to be grossed out by breastmilk too.

That's awesome!

looooooooooool

I absolutely think there is potential here. Currently the probiotics sold are largely made from fecal sources or dairy sources - but we know that the bacteria that live in the vagina are adapted to live specifically there. Why aren't we making probiotics from strains sourced from vaginas originally? Nobody has done…

Yeah. It won't shut up.

Cheese is made from a body fluid which is allowed to ferment with introduced cultures. The original source of at least some of those sources is undoubtedly from animal orifices.

Maui sounds pretty nice.

I'm curious what you think cheese is.

I'm curious what you all think cheese is.

The reason it could be unsafe is because we do know that some women have potentially pathogenic bacteria living in their vaginas. Oral sex is fine because they are a minority and your own GI tract will handle them. But when you culture them you run the risk that the pathogenic bacteria will overrun the safe bacteria.

If you look up how to make yogurt on the internet, it's really pretty simple. The only difference was instead of inoculating with store-bought yogurt or a yogurt started, I used inoculate from my vagina. It was surprisingly easy.