There’s an ugly turn. The story about a company creating probiotics to make vaginas smell like peaches is wrong, that’s not what the company was trying to do; instead, the “biotech entrepreneurs” who presented it as their own were lying, did not understand the project, and completely mangled the purpose. According to the actual founder of the company,
For the record, that’s not how Sweet Peach will work. According to Hutchinson, a user will take a sample of her vaginal microbiome and send it in for analysis. After determining the makeup of her microbiome — in effect, taking a census of the microorganisms that reside in her vagina — the company will supply a personalized regimen of probiotic supplements designed to promote optimal health. By making sure desirable microbes flourish in their proper balance, the supplements will help ensure that bad ones, like the ones that cause yeast infections, can’t get a toehold.
The name alludes not to any quality of the product but to the way peaches have been used as a symbol of the vagina in literature for hundreds of years.
OK, but new problem. It sounds like a scam. I know microbiomes are all the rage nowadays, but there’s no reason to think a scan of the bacteria present in a normal, healthy vagina will be at all useful, or that some remotely calculated dose of supplements determined by a one-time peek at the microbiome will do anything particularly useful. It sure sounds sciencey, though!
Funny how when the Redhead was on serious IV antibitotics, none of the probiotics or even yogurt worked worked as described. Why should I believe anything other than a double study to be submitted to both the FDA and European agencies? If you have the goods, either show it properly, or shut the fuck up…
Dang double study in #1 should be a double-blind study. *sigh*
Do men seriously think that their dicks smell good? Because they don’t.
illyriamxo #3
um, what?
It seems very unlikely that any supplement would directly affect the vagina’s biome. It’s hard enough making what you consume affect the intestine after going through the acid bath of the stomach (plenty of non-acid resistant antibiotics never make it to the drug stage), but at least the intestine is part of the alimentary canal, like the stomach. How rare a chemical would have to be that, after digestion, intestinal absorption, the blood’s bath of enzymes, a pass through the liver’s detox program, the blood’s bath of enzymes once again, absorption into the vagina cells, the enzyme bath subjected to therein, and finally excretion into the vagina, it could still affect the vagina’s flora and fauna. It can be done, but I would expect some solid evidence, not just, as said above, “sciencey” claims. That’s why most vaginal treatments involve putting the medicine directly in the vagina. But America loves its supplements. It’s getting harder to find real medicines in Costco these days through all the nutritional supplements.
Is there any data on what the optimum biome for vagina would like like? There must be a huge range of “who the hell cares” and an even bigger range of “who the hell knows?”
@#3
… dunno, I can’t get close enough to tell…. (agghhh, I said that out loud…). It does seem that almost anything with the term “probiotics” is a scam.
#3, Did you read the post at all?
I’m gonna guess the logic behind #3 was…
-men produced this product to make WOMEN smell better… supposedly.
-why didn’t men look at making themselves smell better first?
could be wrong, but I’d wager I’m not.
My thought was that a probiotic suppository might work. But we know so little about the ideal flora of vaginas anyway.
illyriamxo @3: Chacun ses odeurs, I reckon.
@10…
Actually we do…
I use ecoflora and topical anti-biotics to treat vaginitis. The bacteria are a lactobacillus and are called Doderelin’s Bacillus. They produce the lactic acid that keeps the vagina clean.
In effect it forms a gradient of bacteria where the acidity is so high that other bacteria cannot survive.
The flora develops within a day after birth.
Oh and bad odour is a sign of bad vaginal health and possible infections. Get it checked.
Nope. If Sally doesn’t know about it, then nobody does. She always speaks for all of us.
Suppositories were my thought, too, since you can treat yeast infections that way. Less comfortable, but you don’t have to get it through the digestive tract in working order and hope it moves in where it should.
Granted, I wonder how much one can do unless it’s something like ‘using antibiotics long term, so it’s hard to keep the normal flora alive.’ In which case, repopulating the bacteria regularly might help until they die off again.
OK, sorry. I know so little about vaginal flora anyway. Go ahead, Chas. Inform me.
Or, just snark while other people offer information. That seems to work just as well for you.
Thanks Avicenna.
;)
illyriamxo #3
I’d like to learn what cocktail of probiotics can make my schlong (and my farts for that matter) smell like roses or some aphrodisiac, if it can be diagnosed remotely from a sample of the bacteria at the source.
I thought the Chas M.O. was to say that any art you dislike is actually a failure on your part to understand it, oh and also his tastes are refined beyond your comprehension.
I just wonder where the novelty of this lies. My gynecologist did exactly as described when I asked her about my recurring infections: Sent in a swab to get the current bacterial flora checked, got back results that there was a certain strain that shouldn’t be in there (including information about their antibiotics sensitivity/resistance), killed off the undesirable bacteria with targeted antibiotics (delivered via suppository) and built up the population of desirables afterwards (again suppositories, with bacteria plus lactic acid to help them take hold). A few re-checks to confirm that it worked (which it did, both clinically and test-result-wise).
This was completely standard treatment, and I’m a bit worried to read that things like suppositories and the basics of vaginal health seem so obscure even to in this space with strong feminist leanings.
I can’t quite imagine this working; it assumes that a one-time bespoke course of probiotics is enough to change one’s vaginal steady state, which seems unlikely. As a dude who got an opportune yeast infection while taking antibiotics, my experience was like Redhead’s above, nothing probiotic seemed to work as intended while I was recovering. (And the guidance for being a guy with a yeast infection is minimal, to be charitable.)
Honestly, it sounds like douches without the douches. Except the ones in the head office.
It’s not THAT standard; none of the gynecologists I’ve talked to about my yeast infections so far have mentioned it. But then I’ve been bouncing around free clinics and Medicaid and whatnot for the past few years. I’ve been wanting something like this.
In any case, the company is less than 6 months old, and the founder is all of 20 years old; no wonder she thought the company wasn’t ready for the limelight and was freaking out at the unwanted attention.
I would sure like it if any of these magic health cures and claims worked just a little once. There are some who just reach for all of them hoping they will be true and it makes me fucking sad.
here is something to cheer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjYz80E94VA
uncle frogy
Yeah, while this doesn’t seem as fucked-up as first presented by the business partner, I don’t see the big advantage over what we already have.
I guess that still many women are woefully undereducated about their vaginas and a high tech solution with sending in swabs and getting “personalised” healthcare back may sound really good to them.
In most cases: Make sure your vagina stays in the acidic (is that a word) range. You can test that with ph paper or use that really old school tool called tongue. Yoghurt provides a quick fix (ehm, not the Greek one with honey, okay?), you can also buy probiotics in the pharmacy, something I recommend if you tend to have yeast infections and have to take antibiotics. When problems remain, please go and see a doc.
yes, acidic is a word.
applied to pH.
acidic, neutral, basic.
carry on.
“yes, acidic is a word.” says Ichthyic, with a rather fishy knack for smelly adjectives.
.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3552#comic
Apparently it is possible to engineer Lactobacillus to express luciferase. Scents seem positively tame by comparison.
Pessary, please folks, pessary. Suppositories follow another, nearby, path
Döderlein’s. Interestingly, it has Wikipedia articles in French, German, Portuguese and Swedish, but not in English.
It’s possible to engineer anything to express luciferase. :-|
#30, Intaglio
OED mentions use of suppository as a sort of catch-all ‘goes in somewhere other than the mouth’ term from back in the 6th century. Took the french hundreds of years to invent a specialist term for the vaginal variant.
A quick search on google scholar for ‘vaginal suppository’ returns quite a few results too, so I guess either term is fine nowadays? Still, in the interests of avoiding confusion…
#30 Intaglio –
It annoys me too, but I assumed it was a cultural thing. I’m from Australia, and in Australia we have pessaries. If someone said suppository you would expect them to be talking about the rectum. Especially our esteemed leader, who said that “nobody is the suppository of all knowledge”. I’m certainly not expecting him to get his information from anywhere other than his arse.
Intaglio, #30
Actually, even in medical terminology suppository can refer to either (in the United States at least). They usually write vaginal suppository, but if the context is clear, it can be dropped.
#22 Sally, it was in Germany, so maybe this is one of those unfortunate regional variations in standard of care. Or possibly the fact that it wasn’t just yeast infections but sometimes also bad bacteria (they’re way ickier, as I had the pleasure of finding out) what made the difference. Good luck anyway!
So they’re making customized fanny yogurt to combat yeast infections? Gives a whole new meaning to “fruit on the bottom”.
Hmm. We have so many examples in history of well-meaning attempts to regulate delicate ecological balances. This is like introducing snakes to Hawaii to control the rat population, then introducing mongooses to control the snakes, with the effect that the native birds are all screwed. I can’t imagine how this could possibly go wrong!
ROTFL!!!
Blondin @36
Hoho, this comment would have been delightfully nonsensical if I hadn’t looked up a lot of British slang years back.
Heck, I don’t think there has even been a serious attempt at working out what is optimal for the digestive track. The current method seems to be to assume what ever is there is normal for the person, with only rare exceptions of “transplant”, when long term antibiotic use, or other conditions, have thrown it so far out of whack that its effecting a person’s health, because they don’t have even sub-optimal levels of the right microbials. This is, in fact, sort of annoying, since we *know* that one major source of problems is having the balance of these things go wrong, or change, or even containing versions that, in a small subset of cases, “cause” health issues. But, its only very, very, recently that anyone has even bothered looking – like with the case of resistances and certain artificial sweeteners.
But, yeah. To “fix” those things would require something liken to bone marrow transplanting – you would have to reduce the existing population of the problematic versions of the microbes, before introducing replacements, lest the existing ones out compete, and wipe out the “fixed” ones. We don’t know, in any practical sense, how to do that with the gut, never mind via “supplements”, but these people plan to do it for, as has been pointed out, something that isn’t even “connected” to the digestive system in a direct manner, which would actually fix anything?
I am shocked, shocked that not only is this stuff based on extremely dubious science, but that the dudebros who promoted it are basically just carnival barkers trying to separate fools from their money. Or at least, I would be if we didn’t totally call this on the previous thread.