How to make yoghurt with your vaginal bacteria

Janet Jay of Motherboard recently published an article about her friend Cecilia Westbrook, an MD/PhD-qualified scientist – and vagina-lover and chef, turns out – who made yoghurt out of her vaginal secretions.

The vagina is home to a symbiotic community of bacterial strains, some of which are used – in real life – to culture the yogurt everyone eats everyday, lactobacilli.

Westbrook’s experiment – complete with scientific controls – went a little bit like this:

1. Take one wooden spoon, pan and candy thermometer.

2. Collect vaginal juices with the wooden spoon.

3. Set up three jars of milk: jar 1 is the control with just plain milk and nothing added; jar 2 has her vaginal specimen added; and jar 3 has the positive control set up with real yoghurt as the culture.

4. Leave overnight.

Apparently the first batch tasted ‘sour, tangy, and almost tingly to the tongue’ and she likened it to Indian yogurt. She ate it with blueberries.

Jay asked an expert and the FDA about the validity of the idea, with the response being ‘maybe not such a great idea’. This is because you never know what you’re culturing – you may have some problematic bacteria that could make you sick if you ate it. This is particularly true if your vagina isn’t dominated by lactobacilli anymore like in bacterial vaginosis or a yeast infection.

Going to try it anyway? Good for you! You have been warned.

Got a question? Ask Aunt Vadge. She knows everything!