Wine Bacteria Quotes

In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is Freedom, in water there is bacteria.

Wine is the most healthful and most hygienic of beverages.

A glass or two of red wine may be good for your heart but not for your microbiome. Studies show that just one drink per day in women and two in men can induce dysbiosis and bacterial overgrowth. Levels of good bacteria like Lactobacillus fall, while potential pathogens rise, leading to an increase in toxins and other chemicals that can cause inflammation, damage the liver, and increase permeability of the gut. Most of the overgrowth happens in the small intestine and can lead to malnourishment because the excess bacteria consume the nutrients that the small intestine would normally absorb. Some studies report an incidence of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO) in alcoholics that’s three times that of the general population.

Sugar contributes to tooth decay only indirectly. Like humans, bacteria are fond of it. “Bacteria get all crazy—party, party—they metabolize the sugar, break it down, and they release their metabolites, and these are acid” (though not as acid as cola or wine). In

No one can practice the precepts perfectly, including the Buddha... Boiled vegetables contain dead bacteria. We cannot practice the First Precept or any of the precepts perfectly. But because of the real danger in our society--alcoholism has destroyed so many families and has brought about much unhappiness--we have to do something. We have to live in a way that will eradicate that kind of damage. That is why even if you can be very healthy with one glass of wine every week, I still urge you with all my strength to abandon that glass of wine (76).

Etiology, epidemiology, nosology, and preventive public health would have no basis in reality. Pasteur began to develop an alternative theory during the 1850s. At that time he devoted his attention to two major and related problems of French agriculture: the spoilage of wine transformed by acetic acid fermentation into vinegar, and the spoilage of milk by lactic acid fermentation. This spoilage was universally considered to be a chemical process. Pasteur demonstrated instead that it was due to the action of living microorganisms—bacteria that he identified through the microscope and learned to cultivate in his laboratory.

This line of inquiry led to the discovery that, if heat was applied to destroy the bacteria, spoilage did not occur and the taste of the wine or milk was not affected.

Nearby, towers of bottled water were staged near the runway awaiting distribution. Sure, some bottled water is necessary after a natural disaster, but in general I think it’s one of the least sustainable methods of addressing a water crisis. Once that water was consumed, the bottles simply became mountains of litter covering the already trashed streets of the capital. Without enough bottled water to go around, many earthquake survivors resorted to drinking water from the street gutters. More than one million folks were being exposed to deadly waterborne diseases such as cholera and typhoid. Reusable water filters were what the Haitians needed most. That was exactly where I chose to direct Wine to Water’s response. We partnered with FilterPure, a nonprofit organization out of the Dominican Republic that builds water filters. The filters were ceramic, simple things made much like clay flowerpots. Before the firing process, the clay is mixed with sawdust and a small amount of fine-grain silver. The sawdust burns in the kiln, leaving tiny porous holes for the water to trickle through. The silver mixed throughout kills any bacteria making it through the tiny pores. These pot filters, sitting inside a simple five-gallon plastic bucket, are capable of filtering water for a family of eight to ten people for up to five years. Some folks from FilterPure picked me up at the airport in a truck loaded with filters. Together we started handing them out throughout the city, in refugee camps and at orphanages in the area.

So think about eating plenty of red foods to support healthy Akkermansia (sorry girls, I’m not talking about red wine here): cherries, raspberries, strawberries, pomegranate seeds, red grapes, red apples, and red peppers. Cruciferous vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, and artichokes contain compounds that help detoxify estrogen. Prebiotics and probiotic-rich foods are bacterial darlings. Gut bacteria love to munch on prebiotic foods like garlic, onion, asparagus, and bananas. Probiotic foods such as kefir, kombucha, kimchi, sauerkraut, and other fermented foods bring beneficial bacterial strains, like lactobacillus, to the gut.

In wine there is wisdom. In beer there is freedom. In water there is bacteria.

A normal vagina should have a slightly sweet, slightly pungent odor. It should have the lactic acid smell of yogurt.” The contract is simple. We provide lactobacilli with food and shelter—the comfort of the vaginal walls, the moisture, the proteins, the sugars of our tissue. They maintain a stable population and keep competing bacteria out. Merely by living and metabolizing, they generate lactic acid and hydrogen peroxide, which are disinfectants that prevent colonization by less benign microbes. The robust vagina is an acidic vagina, with a pH of 3.8 to 4.5. That’s somewhat more acidic than black coffee (with a pH of 5) but less piquant than a lemon (pH 2). In fact, the idea of pairing wine and women isn’t a bad one, as the acidity of the vagina in health is just about that of a glass of red wine.

Usually, there is no single moment when everything changes. Pasteur’s fermentation experiments did not on their own overturn centuries of error or obliviousness. He had predecessors: eager dreamers like Cotton Mather, observers pursuing the logic of infection like Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ignaz Semmelweis, run-with-what-works empiricists like the Civil War doctors. Truly, there are vanishingly few singular moments of discovery in the history of science. And yet, while the work he would do over the next three decades is better remembered, this one paper, five pages long, is the claxon, the signal that something momentous was happening. Most important, Pasteur had grasped a singular insight, one of the most important since Leeuwenhoek first saw his tiny wriggling forms and recognized them as alive: germs that could turn juice into wine were envoys from the microcosmos at work in our macroscopic world. They could be employed to our benefit in a vat of wine or riot against our interests when beet juice turns sour. And they might do who knows what else for or to the human beings—and societies. Pasteur knew that he was onto something more than a neat bit of industrial research. His work on fermentation had pushed him beyond yeast and deeper into the microbial world. Over the next two decades, he identified a range of creatures that could drive chemical changes in the media that nourished them—like lactobacillus, a bacterium involved in the lactic acid pathway responsible for sour milk, or Mycoderma aceti (which he misidentified as a microscopic plant)—the complex of organisms that includes the bacteria behind the acetic fermentation that gives us vinegar. He discovered the existence of anaerobic bacteria, microbes that live in the absence of air. He showed that it was possible to engineer fermentations by introducing one microbe or another to the fluid to be transformed, producing alcohol or lactic acid or some other product of interest.