The Mystery of Probiotic Tea: Can Bacteria Survive Boiling Water?
How to Survive Boiling Water
I bought a probiotic tea that tasted terrible, suspecting the boiling water killed the bacteria before I drank them. Intrigued by this paradox, I decided to test if the BC30 strain could actually survive the brewing process. Drawing inspiration from Louis Pasteur's work on fermentation and the legendary Random Hall milk, I set out to grow these bacteria in the lab to uncover the truth behind the marketing.
Why throw something away when you can tell a story about it?
- peterabbitcook
So under most brewing conditions a nonzero amount of this microbe survive, but that count is 3 orders of magnitude lower what might be termed a “therapeutic dose?”
What even is a good experimental design for probiotic tea? Brew -> agitate in hydrochloric acid & digestive enzymes for X minutes -> mix with billions of existing gut microbes (that may kill this microbe or out-compete it for resources) and incubate at body temperature -> count the number of new colonies of this particular microbe?
- cratermoon
This almost throwaway line from the article struck me as an example of what we can do with technology, if we choose to put our billions of dollars towards it: "I downloaded the BC30 genome".
- odyssey7
Another organism that survives pasteurization is paratuberculosis, in milk. It is commonly found in commercial dairy herds. In my opinion, this is alarming.
Many consider it to be a candidate for the cause of Crohn’s disease. Johne’s disease, which occurs in a subset of cattle infected by paratuberculosis, bears many similarities to Crohn’s disease.
When Crohn’s disease was first described, it was believed to be an intestinal tuberculosis, though tests seemed to counter this idea; to this day, it remains difficult to test humans for paratuberculosis infections.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07400...
[1] https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(19)...