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Chowing Down On Meat, Dairy Alters Gut Bacteria A Lot, And Quickly

From Swiss to cheddar, cheeses depend on the action of microbes for their flavor and aroma. But it's far from clear how these teams of microbes work together to ripen cheese.

To a cheese-maker, that's just the beauty of the art. To a scientist, it sounds like an experiment waiting to happen.

A handful of scientists who study cheese recently gathered to share their latest findings at a farm in the English county of Somerset. They know cheese well here — after all, Somerset invented cheddar.

Somerset cheese-maker Jamie Montgomery hosted the conference. "We've been making cheddar here for three generations," he says. "My grandfather bought the estate in 1911."

Montgomery's cheese is particularly microbe-rich. That sets it apart from most supermarket-bought cheese, which is made from milk that is pasteurized to kill any potentially harmful bacteria. Then a few microbes are added back in to ferment the cheese.

But Montgomery and many other artisan producers never pasteurize their milk – it's raw. The milk's natural microbial community is still in there. This microbial festival gives it variety and richness that commercial cheeses can't copy.

"That's our defense, that's where the artisan cheese-maker is always going to have an edge," Montgomery says.

It's this complex community of microbes that intrigues the scientists and cheese-makers gathered in Somerset. For Rachel Dutton, whose lab at Harvard University studies everything from tangy stilton to creamy brie, cheese is a very cooperative subject, she says.

"I wanted to find a microbial community to study that I would be able to grow the organisms in the lab, deconstruct and reconstruct these communities," she says.

Dutton's team just finished a study of more than 130 different cheese samples from around the world. Different types of cheeses have different microbial tenants – less to do with geography, and more to do with cheese-making method, like whether you wash the rind of the cheese with brine, or age it, or keep it in a moist room.

Whatever type you favor, Dutton says that cheese could be affecting the microbes in your own body. Our guts are teeming with bacteria that help us digest food, and many of the bacteria found in fermented foods make it through the digestive tract unscathed.

But whether they interact much isn't clear, she says. "What they're doing, if anything, I think is still a wide-open question."

Cheese lovers would like to think that – like other microbe-rich foods – cheese could be good for us.

"There's a very good chance that consumption of them will influence the gut microbiome, and could in turn have some positive benefits," says microbiologist and cheesemaker Dennis D'Amico, who traveled to the meeting from his base at the University of Connecticut.

Those gains could include boosting metabolism, or stopping "bad" bugs from taking hold. But there's no evidence for this yet, because the microbes in our guts and in our foods are so complex that it's hard to work out how they affect each other.

Farm owner Jamie Montgomery is delighted that his cheese will be keeping scientists busy for a while yet. "They're all saying that in cheese, they're probably only scratching the surface. And I love that."

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People often get flummoxed around death. Some get teary, others emotionally distant from the inevitable. An exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire," embodies that tension with mourning fashion from the mid-1800s to the early 20th century. It has multi-layered fabric, tight bodices and enveloping head gear that emulates the garb of cloistered nuns. Even the faces of the ghost-white mannequins seem closed off, demure and unshakable. This is death at its most bloodless.

"I wanted Victorian melodrama; I wanted widows collapsing on the floor," says Harold Koda, curator in charge of the museum's Costume Institute. Still, Koda, who worked with a co-curator, says he would have liked a bit more juice in the installation. "You see an inert dress on a stiff mannequin. How do you get the fact that this was because somebody died, you know?"

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Joanna Ebenstein, creative director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, poses with a taxidermy two-headed duckling. Liyna Anwar for StoryCorps hide caption

itoggle caption Liyna Anwar for StoryCorps

Joanna Ebenstein, creative director of the Morbid Anatomy Museum, poses with a taxidermy two-headed duckling.

Liyna Anwar for StoryCorps

Across the river, in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, the Morbid Anatomy Museum tells a different story. Creative Director Joanna Ebenstein describes a scene from the museum's gallery walls: "You see here four women weeping into handkerchiefs. Their faces are obscured by their handkerchiefs and they're standing around a column in black. To me, that sums up the romanticism of Victorian mourning."

Ebenstein is a very serious woman in her 40s; she wears glasses and shoulder-length, straight hair. Standing in the museum's front gallery, she points to a box with a glass top.

"What we're looking at here is a large, framed shadowbox and in that shadowbox is a wreath of brown flowers," she explains. "And if you look closely, each of those flowers is made from hair coiled around wire. And this is probably a whole family's hair; you can tell from the different colors — you can see gray, you can see black, you can see brown."

Part of the beauty, she says, is its permanence. "What symbolizes mourning more than a floral wreath? This is a floral wreath, made of the hair of the family, that will never decay."

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This shadowbox, which features a floral wreath of human hair, is also part of the museum's "Art of Mourning" exhibition. Shannon Taggart/Courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum hide caption

itoggle caption Shannon Taggart/Courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum

This shadowbox, which features a floral wreath of human hair, is also part of the museum's "Art of Mourning" exhibition.

Shannon Taggart/Courtesy of the Morbid Anatomy Museum

There can be beauty in death, but there's tragedy here too. One vitrine has photographs of dead infants, many of them swaddled in their mother's arms. To Ebenstein, none of this is morbid.

"My whole life I've been called morbid for thinking about death and I used accept that," she says. "And at a certain point, I began to think: Well, why is it morbid to look at death? If we're all going die and every single culture but us seems to have some sophisticated, aboveboard way of talking about it in art and philosophy, why don't we? And why should I be considered morbid for being interested in what I consider the greatest problem of being a human being, which is foreknowledge of our own death?"

Ebenstein seems to have come by this obsession naturally. In a back room of the museum, there's a library of books, bones, ephemera and specimens in jars (hence the museum's name). One jar holds a bat, another a snake and yet another a pig fetus, and they're all stored in a cabinet once owned by her grandfather, who was a doctor.

The Morbid Anatomy Museum's staff seems to be a kind of extended Addams family. Tracy Hurley Martin, the museum's CEO and board chair, grew up around death. She says, "Our uncle Vito had a funeral home and he lived in it and he treated people like they were deli meat."

For Morbid Anatomy Museum Founder, Spooky Things Are Life's Work Oct. 31, 2014

The museum's attraction is partly its creepy funereal vibe. The black painted building is no Metropolitan Museum of Art, but it's become a destination. Cawleen Cavanis lives in Queens, a 40 minute subway ride away. She brought a visiting friend and was checking out the gift shop's offerings: a diaphanized mouse, sugar skulls, museum T-shirts and books, including The Morbid Anatomy Anthology, with essays about stuffed humans and demonic children. "It looks like just a lot of interesting specimens here, you know," Cavanis says. "It's definitely worth the trip."

But if you're wondering about taking selfies in the museum, Joanna Ebenstein points to a sign on the door to the galleries: "Photograph taking, digital, analog, video, spirit, is absolutely forbidden."

For those visitors who want to do more than admire, or acquire, the Morbid Anatomy Museum has lectures and workshops on making a bat in a jar and Victorian hair art.

Wait Wait is in Austin, Texas this week, and so we've invited country singer Dale Watson to play our quiz. Watson has that true Austin sound — not to mention his own honky-tonk bar.

We've invited Watson to play a game called, "Elementary, my dear Dale!" Three questions about the immortal detective, Sherlock Holmes.

Mexican authorities says drug gang members have confessed to killing 43 students from a teachers college in the country's south and described a grisly disposal of the bodies — burning them on a pyre and then pulverizing teeth and bones to prevent the remains from being identified.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam, speaking at a news conference in Mexico City on Friday, played a video purporting to be three gang members confessing to the killings, The Associated Press reports. Another video, the AP says, "showed hundreds of charred fragments of bone and teeth that had been dumped in and along the San Juan River" near the town of Cocula.

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Pictures of the detainees for the case of missing students are seen displayed on a television screen during a news conference at the Attorney General's Office building in Mexico City on Friday. HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov hide caption

itoggle caption HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov

Pictures of the detainees for the case of missing students are seen displayed on a television screen during a news conference at the Attorney General's Office building in Mexico City on Friday.

HANDOUT/Reuters/Landov

Authorities recovered black plastic garbage bags containing ash and bones. Karam said the remains matched what authorities were told by the suspects, who described in detail how they loaded the students into two trucks, killed them, dismembered and burned their bodies and then tossed bags full of remains into a river.

The bizarre case allegedly began when the mayor of Iguala, Jose Luis Abarca, ordered police to attack the students.

The Los Angeles Times reported earlier this week that authorities believe Abarca and his wife, Maria de los Angeles Pineda, "ordered local police to intercept and do away with the students, from a rural college for the poor, who were en route to Iguala and might have planned to disrupt a party and speech by Pineda."

The newspaper says: "The case soon revealed the deep infiltration by drug gangs of police and City Hall in Iguala, about 80 miles south of Mexico City, and in other municipalities in Guerrero state. The governor, Angel Aguirre, was forced to resign amid the scandal, which has also handed President Enrique Pea Nieto his worst security crisis in nearly two years of government."

Six students were killed in the Sept. 26 police assault and 43 others were allegedly handed over to members of the Guerreros Unidos drug gang. Authorities believe the police told the gang that the students were members of a rival trafficking group.

NPR's Carrie Kahn says that at Friday's news conference, Karam admitted that he cannot positively say the remains are those of the students, but he said he can say with certainty that the three new suspects killed the 43 students.

"The high level of degradation caused by the fire in the remains make it very difficult to extract the DNA that will allow an identification," Karam said at a news conference.

"What I can tell you with certainty [is that] there was a homicide of many people," he said. "The statements of [the suspects], the work of the experts, what they found in each one of the tombs, the certainty of where the garbage bags were ... I have no doubt that there was a mass homicide."

More than 70 people have been detained in the case so far, including Abarca and Pineda, who were captured Tuesday after weeks on the run.

Mexico's drug wars

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