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Asked by budderlord to Duncan, Grant, Julie, Nik, Rachel on 11 Mar 2013.
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Nik Watson answered on 11 Mar 2013:
Im not an expert on bacteria but my understanding is that some are good for you and some are bad for you and everything else is in between .If you do some research I think you will find that the human body contains lots of different bacteria especially in places like the stomach
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Grant Campbell answered on 11 Mar 2013:
There are broadly three types of bacteria – the good, the bad and the ugly. The good ones allow us to produce foods like yoghurt and cheese, by producing acid but not producing things that poison us. The bad ones either infect our bodies to make us sick, or produce poisons that make us sick. The ugly ones cause food to spoil – it may not necessarily make us sick, but would taste very bad.
There are indeed bacteria in meat, and indeed in most of the foods we eat, but as long as they are at low levels and are not the nasty ones, then this is not a problem – we have plenty of other bacteria in our bodies already.
Much of food processing is about controlling the number of bacteria to acceptably low levels, usually through combinations of killing them off and slowing their growth. So, for example, we pastuerise milk, to reduce the number of live bacteria, then we store it in the fridge, to slow the growth of those that remain. -
Julie Bland answered on 11 Mar 2013:
Both Nik and Grant answered the question very well. Bacteria are too often presented as bad and that why we disinfect all the time everything but in fact a lot are very useful.
You can find a lot cheese makers which never disinfect their equipement they clean it but keep the bacteria because it is what will make their cheese taste good.
Cheese made from raw milk has been shown to present less risk when produce whith good standard than cheese made from pasteurized milk. This is because you sometimes get you milk comtaminated by bad bacteria at very low dose during cheese-making and if you have no bacteria present at all due to pasteurization it will be able to develop very fast. In raw milk because there is already a lot of good bacteria it won’t be able to develop that much due to competition. -
Duncan Gaskin answered on 11 Mar 2013:
The bad bugs found in food is my research area, so I guess I should be able to answer this……
The simple answer is that the bacteria in cheese are safe to eat because they don’t produce any poisons that harm us or grow in our guts and cause disease, while bacteria in meat can produce poisons and grow in our guts and make us ill.
The idea of good and bad bacteria is a good one, but the good bacteria aren’t just the ones we use to make cheese and yoghurt. Our guts are full of millions and millions of good bacteria. In fact there are a greater number of bacteria in you than there are human cells in you! Without these bacteria you wouldn’t be able to digest all of the food you eat, or get all of the nutrients out of it – oh and you wouldn’t fart either!
They also protect you by preventing many of the bad bacteria you eat from being able to grow and cause illness. They can do this because there are usually many many more of them than the bad bugs and so they use up the food that the bad bugs need to grow, and they also produce special poisons that kill the bad bugs (but don’t hurt us).
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