Post by cjm on Sept 27, 2014 18:12:30 GMT
Bacteria in Wine May be Good for Your Health
Wine harbors probiotics that may have health benefits
Sep 26, 2014 |By Agata Blaszczak Boxe and LiveScience
There are bacteria in wine that may be beneficial for people's health, new research finds.
In the study, researchers in Spain isolated 11 strains of bacteria from wine, including strains of Lactobacillus, which are also found in yogurt, as well as Oenococcus and Pediococcus bacteria, which are associated with the wine-making process.
"Up to now, many studies have reported that the best [foods] to deliver probiotics are dairy fermented products, so that the probiotic properties of wine-related [Lactobacillus] were hardly studied," said study author Dolores González de Llano of Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Spain.
But "nowadays, there is a need for novel and nondairy probiotics, from the increasing number of lactose-intolerance cases occurring in the world population, coupled with the unfavorable effect of cholesterol contained in fermented dairy products," González de Llano told Live Science. [Don't Be Fooled: 5 Probiotics Myths]
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The probiotic properties of the lactic-acid bacteria isolated from wine are similar to those of probiotics that come from foods like dairy products such as fermented milk or yogurt and dry sausages, and foods of plant origin such as sauerkraut and olives, fruits, cereals, meat or fish, she said.
The new findings do not mean, however, that drinking a couple glasses of wine a day will provide the same health benefits as eating a food like yogurt, she said.
Even though the moderate consumption of wine, which she defined as two glasses per day, may confer certain health benefits, wine does not currently provide a sufficient amount of probiotics to be beneficial, because many of the bacteria are eliminated during a process called sulfating, which stabilizes wine, she said. (Sulfating is the process of adding sulfites, which are preservatives commonly used in winemaking.)
However, probiotics "could be isolated from wine in order to be commercialized as probiotics, or added to functional foods," she said.