Kombucha has jumped out into the mainstream. It may well have beneficial health benefits. It may also have negative health benefits.
It has a long history of word of mouth distribution to the point that it landed in my fridge decades ago, although never used.
The science seems to have dragged on this, not least because uniformity is certainly an issue. It produces a complex of products that may have no end of biological value. Thus we have multi - variant problems before and after.
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Drink to Your Health?
Kombucha's unlikely rise from Soviet elixir to modern-day miracle drink.
In May of 1995, Ruth Patras
realized that something was wrong with her 5-week-old daughter, Ciara.
Initially happy and healthy, about a month after Ciara was born, the
whites of her eyes started to turn yellow. Over the next few days, the
color deepened, and her appetite diminished. Patras took Ciara to her
pediatrician, who sent the family to Children’s Hospital of
Philadelphia. Tests revealed that Ciara had biliary atresias, a rare
liver disease in which the ducts that pass bile from the liver to the
gallbladder and the first section of the small intestine become blocked.
Bile serves two functions in the body, helping to digest fat and carry
waste out of the liver. When trapped, the excess bile damages liver
cells, eventually leading to liver failure..
Doctors told Patras
that the only hope for Ciara was a complex surgery known as the Kasai
procedure, in which the gallbladder and bile ducts are removed and the
liver is connected directly to the small intestine. The Kasai procedure
is hardly a cure, though: It’s only successful 30 to 50 percent of the
time, and when it fails, patients need a liver transplant as early as
age 1 or 2; even when it works, around three-quarters of patients still
require a liver transplant by their 20th birthday.
After the
procedure, doctors explained, the rest was up to Ciara’s immune system.
Hearing this, Patras felt the first spark of hope she’d had since the
diagnosis. She walked out of the room, away from other shell-shocked
parents, to the pay phone at the end of the hall, where she called her
husband. She told him that she was bringing the baby home that weekend,
and that he needed to open a package that was waiting on the kitchen
counter..
While pregnant with Ciara, Patras had heard a guest on the daytime talk show Leeza
discussing a drink that could boost the immune system. Patras had
already lost her mother, uncle, several aunts, and both grandmothers to
cancer, so strengthening her immune system seemed appealing. She ordered
a kit to make the beverage, a fermented tea called kombucha..
Through
the confusing whirlwind of doctor’s appointments leading up to Ciara’s
diagnosis, Patras began bottle-feeding kombucha to her sick child. One
week after Ciara underwent the Kasai procedure, Patras continued the
kombucha regimen. Ciara’s pediatrician objected, but within a few weeks,
bile began to drain from her liver, and in follow-up exams, Ciara’s
liver appeared softer and smaller. Patras knew this could be the result
of a successful Kasai procedure, but suspected that, somehow, the
kombucha was involved. She waited nearly a year before telling Ciara’s
pediatrician about it again. When she did, the doctor ordered her to
stop giving it to Ciara immediately. “She actually reprimanded me,”
Patras told me..
The doctor said that there was no scientific
evidence for kombucha’s safety or efficacy, but Patras didn’t need any:
Her daughter’s health was proof enough..
Some $600 million worth
of kombucha was sold last year, peddled everywhere from bodegas to bars
to Bed Bath & Beyond. It’s on tap at cool coffee shops; it’s in
your neighbor’s fridge; it’s on Entourage and The Mindy Project and Flaked. Its ubiquity in post-Portlandia America has been largely powered by the reverberations of the claims that attracted Patras over 20 years ago: that it supports digestion, metabolism, cell integrity, immunity, appetite control, weight control, liver function,
and healthy skin and hair — or as artsy labels put it today, by
promises that it will “rejuvenate, restore, revitalize, recharge,
rebuild, regenerate, replenish, regain, rebalance, renew.”
A small
fraction of today’s kombucha drinkers consume it in hopes of curing
cancer or alleviating psoriasis. The vast majority are just taking part
in the recent aspirational hegemony of “wellness” — the cultural tidal
wave that has given us skincare as coping mechanism, turmeric lattes with almond milk, and brain dust — hoping that kombucha might be part of the recipe, whether it balances their microbiome or simply boosts their energy levels.
Bruce
Chassy, a professor emeritus in the department of food science and
human nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, says
there’s a short explanation for why people have turned to kombucha to be
healthy, or at least for a whiff of wellness: “More and more people are
mistrusting of many, many different things, whether it’s politicians or
corporations or traditional medicine.”
Americans are choosing to believe in their intuition, to choose whole foods and natural products instead of processed foods and pills.
“The more important part of this is that people have changed remarkably
in what they will consider as evidence or reason for forming an idea
about something,” Chassy says. “We’re inundated with information and
conflicting claims. People are believing what they want to believe, and
ignoring the rest.” (Case in point: The debate over genetically modified
organisms, in which Chassy is embroiled after documents showed
that he accepted money from Monsanto even while presenting himself as
an independent academic researcher.) Seeded by dubious prophets with
tidings of good health, and stoked by thrifty entrepreneurs, the
kombucha phenomenon took root in America at a perfect moment — just as
some people began to lose trust in modern medicine and wanted to believe
in something more.
A few months before Ruth Patras
heard kombucha touted on a daytime talk show, a group of housemates in
Portland, Oregon, tried it for the first time after a friend left some
behind. One of them, Robert Deering, was especially intrigued. Deering
holds a BS in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a
master’s in microbiology from the University of Washington; after grad
school, he spent a few years working in a cancer research lab in Seattle
before moving to Portland. Curiosity led him to the library at nearby
Portland State, where he found a 1940s book on fermentation with a short
section on kombucha. It explained that kombucha starts with a SCOBY — a
symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast — which forms in the organic
compound cellulose.
In
your hand, a SCOBY feels like Play-Doh that’s soaked in water; in the
bottom of your glass, it looks about as appetizing as a loogie. Kombucha
is produced when a SCOBY is combined with sugar and brewed tea — black,
oolong, or green, as long it’s from the tea plant, Camellia sinensis.
The entire process takes about two weeks. First, the sugar and hot tea
are combined. Once the sweetened tea has cooled, an acidifier — often
matured kombucha — can be added to prevent unfriendly bacteria. Then the
SCOBY is placed on top and the container is covered with a breathable
cloth, so that air can get in but dust and fruit flies can’t. As the
SCOBY lowers the pH of the sweetened tea, its rising acidity kills off
pathogenic bacteria, and acid-tolerant microbes consume the oxygen in
it, beginning fermentation. When the oxygen is gone, the yeast starts
breaking down the sugar, converting it to alcohol; the bacteria in the
SCOBY then breaks that down to form various acids, resulting in the
final product: kombucha. It smells like diluted vinegar and malty yeast,
and when poured into a glass, it bubbles like champagne. Once bottled,
the bubbles remain, making it more interesting than water, less sweet
than juice, and less potent than soda.
Deering learned that no two
SCOBYs are exactly the same, and no two batches of kombucha are exactly
alike, in part because each batch picks up different yeast microbes
from the air. Room temperature and the water also affect the flavor, the
speed of fermentation, and the development of gases. Alcohol continues
forming as long as there is yeast and sugar in the mixture, so the final
alcohol content depends on when the SCOBY is removed, or when the
kombucha is pasteurized. If kept unpasteurized, or raw, fermentation
continues, and so does alcohol production. When treated properly, each
SCOBY can be used to start a new batch — or two, because every few days
SCOBYs sprout a thin layer of cellulose that easily peels off the bottom
and can be used on its own.
Science has yet to offer a better
explanation of how kombucha develops than what Deering found in that
70-year-old book, and no one has definitively determined where the first
SCOBY came from — only that kombucha has almost always been synonymous
with miraculous health claims.
Egyptologist Zahi Hawass once
claimed kombucha was first brewed during the reign of Khufu, who
commissioned the Great Pyramid, around 2500 BCE; The Big Book of Kombucha
points to a legend claiming it originated in northern China in the
third century BCE, but wasn’t regularly consumed there until the seventh
century CE at the earliest; authors Harald Tietze, Andra Anastazia
Malczewski, and Marie Nadine Antol each claim a Korean physician named
Kom-bu brought it to Japan in 414 CE, as he attempted to treat the
Emperor Inkyo’s various disorders. Some say Genghis Khan’s armies
carried it west, others say it traveled along the Silk Road. Whatever
its ancient origins, German scientists were referencing it in their work
by the 1850s.
Dozens of far-fetched stories detail the drink’s
healing powers. In one tale, people live to over 100 in the 8,500-person
village of Kargasok on the Ob River because they drink kombucha. There,
legend has it that kombucha allowed an 80-year-old woman to give birth
to her first child, fathered by a 130-year-old man. Russian and German
doctors mentioned kombucha in more than 100 publications between 1917
and 1935. During that time, it came to be known as the “tea of
immortality” in various parts of Europe; in France, it was known as l’élixir de longue vie.
These
claims traveled predominantly by word-of-mouth, including informational
leaflets, until 1994, when Tietze, a German-born kombucha drinker,
perpetuated its mythos in a dubiously sourced book called Kombucha: The Miracle Fungus,
which claimed to summarize the various medical benefits that European
doctors, as well as people who wrote him letters, ascribed to kombucha —
and which devoted kombucha drinkers once pointed to as evidence of its
medical efficacy. Tietze describes, for instance, a 1987 study by
Reinhold Weisner, a possibly made-up physician and biologist working in
Bremen, Germany, who conducted a trial with 246 patients to compare
kombucha treatment with Interferon, a common immune-boosting drug used
in the treatment of various illnesses. According to Tietze, Weisner
found kombucha more effective in treating asthma, 92 percent as
effective in treating rheumatism, and 89 percent as effective on kidney
disorders. (“There’s a long history of bad studies coming out of the
former Soviet Union,” Chassy notes. “The medicine was deeply rooted in
folk beliefs, and what they wanted to come out influenced what came
out.”)
Tietze questionably claims that kombucha made its first
voyage across the Atlantic Ocean on the strength of those Soviet health
studies, when Ronald Reagan was diagnosed with cancer in 1985. According
to Tietze’s fantastical account, Reagan read the semi-autobiographical
novel of Nobel Prize recipient Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and credited
kombucha with helping him overcome cancer in the 1950s; inspired, Reagan
acquired a SCOBY from Japan and started drinking a liter of kombucha
every day, stopping the cancer from spreading. (Reagan in fact had a
polyp and two feet of his lower intestine surgically removed.)
The
White House has never confirmed whether Reagan drank kombucha, and it’s
not mentioned in any official biographies — if he did drink it, he was
one of the few known to do so outside niche hippie communities in the
U.S. until 1992, when it emerged on the alternative health scene in
California. (A mycologist in Olympia, Washington, once told the New York Times
that a pharmaceutical company asked him to research kombucha in 1980.)
That year, a German-born instructor offered it to a class at an LA
meditation center, saying it would “help heal the planet.” In that
meditation group was a graphic designer named Betsy Pryor, who might
have been the first person to commercialize kombucha in the U.S. “One
evening after class, where I’d silently asked God to help me keep people
alive ... the meditation instructor emerged from the center kitchen
clutching an odd, pancake-looking thing encased in a clear plastic bag,”
Pryor wrote on her now-defunct website. “[The instructor] paused,
looking at me intently. ‘It’s going to help heal the planet.’ A few
weeks after I started to drink the Kombucha Tea, I felt like I’d been
reborn.” An immediate believer, Pryor and her partner
began selling SCOBYs by mail order the next year, charging $50, or $15
if a customer was ill. A sticker on each package said to “Expect a
Miracle,” and Pryor repeated this claim in various interviews.
The next year, 1993, kombucha appeared in a lengthy feature in a bimonthly health magazine in Florida, and by 1994, the New York Times
reported, Pryor’s company, Laurel Farms, was selling more than 400
SCOBYs a month and fielding at least a hundred calls a day. It became especially popular within the HIV/AIDS community after an article in the November 1994 issue of New Age Journal detailed the story of an HIV-positive man
who claimed kombucha had boosted his T-cell count, among other
life-changing improvements. A month after the article was published, a
doctor at the Pacific Oaks Medical Group in LA estimated that at least 15 to 20 percent
of AIDS patients were experimenting with it. By the end of that year,
with believers able to purchase SCOBYs at health food stores from
Manhattan to LA or by mail order, kombucha’s reputation as a modern
philosopher’s stone seemed to have cemented itself.
And that’s when it nearly all came undone. By December, a New York Times headline asked whether kombucha was “A Magic Mushroom or a Toxic Fad?” That same month, the FDA’s Los Angeles spokeswoman, Rosario Vior, told the Washington Post, “You have to ask, if this stuff is so wonderful, why don’t the medical professionals know about it?”
The
concerns seemed to be validated a few months later, when a woman named
Lila Mae Williamson died one month shy of her 60th birthday in the
conservative farming community of Spencer, Iowa. Williamson had been
taking medications for seizures, diabetes, hypertension, and other ills
when her son told her that a tax client had informed him that kombucha
would cure all of her aches and pains, and boost her energy. She started
drinking 4 ounces a day and reported that her mood was improving and
some of the aches were subsiding. Her daughter Vonada thought it was
“bullshit,” she told me, but there was no changing her mother’s mind.
On
April 1, Williamson passed out near her bathtub. A neighbor found her
and called 911; two days later, she died. Doctors said she’d suffered
from severe lactic acidosis, or excess levels of lactic acid in the
bloodstream; the coroner listed the official cause of death as
peritonitis, an inflammation of the thin abdominal lining than can be a
precursor to sepsis. When FDA investigators asked Vonada if her mother
had recently changed anything in her diet, one thing came to mind:
kombucha.
One week later, a 49-year-old woman, also from Spencer,
entered the ER. She was having difficulty breathing, which doctors
attributed to acute pulmonary edema, and her lactic acid levels were
even higher than Williamson’s. She went into cardiac arrest, but was
revived and went home two days later. She too had recently started
drinking kombucha. Investigators later found that of the area’s 10,000
residents, several hundred people had tried kombucha tea, and about 80
percent of them had become “committed drinkers,” according to a Washington Post story published at the time.
The
FDA and CDC investigated both incidents, but didn’t find a conclusive
link between the symptoms and kombucha. Regardless, a spokesman for the
Iowa Department of Health told the Post, “We are still suspicious of it.” On April 10, 1995, the department issued a news release
recommending “that persons refrain from drinking kombucha tea until the
role of the tea in the two cases of illness had been evaluated fully.”
In
another, more recent era, perhaps news of a pair of incidents in Iowa
and a strongly worded warning from the health department would have
spread, and smothered the American kombucha trend just as it was
beginning to go mainstream. But kombucha’s march to ubiquity never even
slowed down. Robert Deering, after many more nights at the Portland
State library studying kombucha, had launched Oocha Brew, the first
bottled kombucha brand in the U.S., just a few months prior. The label
originally said “sparkling tea” — the word “fermented” was purposefully
left off the bottle because the company didn’t want to scare off
potential customers outside of alternative health circles. It worked: A
growing grocery chain called Whole Foods became interested in
distributing it.
On the night of November 16,
1995, Steve Lee was a dinner guest at the home that his Russian
business partner, Peter Lisovski, shared with his mother in St.
Petersburg. They lived in a nine-story Soviet-era building, where the
hallways reeked of urine. As they finished dinner, Lee excused himself
to use the bathroom. On the short walk through the starkly furnished
apartment, he passed Mrs. Lisovski’s bedroom. The door was wide open,
and he couldn’t resist peeking inside. There, he spotted a single bed,
the corners of a drab wool blanket tucked neatly under the mattress. On
the metal nightstand he saw a gallon-sized glass jug filled with dark
liquid, the opening at the top covered with cheesecloth. A thick,
whitish blob floated near the surface. When he returned to the table,
Lee asked his host about the contents of the jug. Mrs. Lisovski
hesitated at first, but eventually, with her son translating, she
explained that the liquid inside the jug was “mushroom tea.”
Mrs.
Lisovski seemed surprised by Lee’s interest. To her, mushroom tea, or
kombucha, was simply part of everyday life. She had been drinking it
since 1939, when her great-aunt gave her a slice of a SCOBY. After her
husband was killed in one of Stalin’s gulags, Mrs. Lisovski carried the
culture as she moved her family from Siberia to Petrograd (which is now
St. Petersburg). She offered Lee a piece to take back to Portland. That
evening, he wrote in his journal: “Introduced to ‘mushroom tea,’ a
fermented tea. Strange, unique old world taste allowing for a clear
light headed feeling.”
Lee had made his fortune in tea: Inspired
in 1971 by the herbs, spices, and teas displayed in a department called
“Gates of Eden” in Portland’s first health food store, he went on to
establish what would become the world’s largest mail-order tea company
in the 1970s, and co-founded Tazo, a high-end tea company, in 1993. He
was in Russia to develop a Russian tea label. As he boarded his flight
home two days later, he carried a piece of the SCOBY wrapped in tinfoil.
Before settling in, Lee asked the stewardess to place the package in
the mini fridge. Lee and his “mushroom” were bound for Portland. He made
a few batches at home but eventually let the SCOBY die, and thought
that was the end of his ventures in kombucha.
A
year or two later, Lee found kombucha being served at a ballet festival
in Portland, by Robert Deering’s Oocha Brew. The scale of the health
claims, that this drink was a cure-all, reminded Lee of the hype
surrounding plain old tea back in the 1960s and ’70s. “If you were sick,
have tea; if you were well, have tea. Need a pickup? Have tea,” he
recalled. He looked around for other brands, road-tripping along the
West Coast to speak with the owners of natural food stores to see if
they knew about kombucha and if they would sell it. Along the way, he
discovered a teenager in Beverly Hills who had launched GT’s Kombucha
after his mother, Laraine, said that drinking kombucha had helped her
beat breast cancer. GT Dave was selling his brew in “ugly salad jars”
with no branding, Lee said. Sensing a business opportunity, Lee
contacted the brewers he’d met at the festival. He planned to offer to
invest. No one called back.
Lee tried again in 1999, and this time
heard back from Deering, who reported that Oocha Brew had folded. The
company nearly landed a deal with Whole Foods, he explained, but it had
eventually fallen apart because the chain wanted to pasteurize the drink
to keep it within the FDA’s specifications for non-alcoholic beverages.
Oocha Brew was too small to take on the expensive process of
pasteurization, and it eventually sank the entire company. A few months
later, Deering joined Lee and a few other partners to launch Kombucha
Wonder Drink, which they decided to pasteurize. (That same year,
Starbucks bought Tazo for $8.1 million.)
With a label that
featured the phrase, “A Legendary Health Drink,” KWD hit stores in June
2001, first in Portland and then slowly along the West Coast. Sales were
strong — “like hot cakes,” Lee said — in the first year, but started to
slow as the novelty wore off. Kombucha brewers struggled to gain fans
outside of the health market. “People would spit it out and cough,” Lee
says. “Every time someone spit it out, I’d hear that voice. ‘What are
you doing, Steve? What are you doing, Steve?’”
Lee and Deering
stuck with it, though, and their product led the market for a few years.
By 2002, a bunch of regional brands were available, all selling
unpasteurized kombucha. GT’s, which had grown out of its ugly salad jar
days to become the number-two bottled kombucha brand in the country,
remained confident that raw, not pasteurized, was the only way to
maintain the drink’s integrity. In the mid-2000s, this decision paid off
during a resurgence in the raw food craze — people were running scared
from carbohydrates and sugar, avoiding soda at all costs. Probiotics
were trendy, which made raw kombucha, with its probiotic claims, seem
like the gold standard. By 2003, Whole Foods was no longer concerned
with pasteurizing, and GT’s quickly took over as market leader, helped
along by photos of Madonna, Reese Witherspoon, and Halle Berry sipping
from the colorful bottles, touting the transformative healing powers of a
raw diet in magazines; mainstream media outlets reported that Paramount
Studios ordered GT’s by the case.
As suddenly as being raw had
boosted GT’s to the top of the kombucha pack, that decision threatened
the entire burgeoning industry. In mid-2010, an inspector with the Maine
Department of Agriculture’s consumer protection unit noticed a few
leaking bottles while performing a routine inspection at the Whole Foods
in Portland, Maine. He decided to send the bottles to the food sciences
lab at the University of Maine, where test results showed alcohol
levels ranging from about 0.5 percent to over 2.5 percent. Several state
chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous had also reportedly complained to
Whole Foods. On June 15, 2010, Whole Foods stores nationwide removed all
kombucha from their shelves, replacing displays with small laminated
notes explaining that the stores were looking into “slightly elevated
alcohol levels in some products.” Within days, tabloids reported that
drinking kombucha had set off actress Lindsay Lohan’s alcohol-monitoring
anklet.
Testing of various raw brands revealed alcohol levels as
high as 3 percent, far above the Federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and
Trade Bureau limit of 0.5 percent for non-alcoholic beverages. In
comparison, the alcohol level in a can of Coors Light is 4.2 percent; in
glasses of red wine, it varies from 11 to 14 percent. Deering and Lee’s
Kombucha Wonder Drink was the only one left in stores, because it was
pasteurized. Several regional kombucha companies went out of business,
unable to afford the heavy bills associated with refining their
production processes. Others applied for approval to be sold as
alcoholic beverages. GT’s fought the new rules at first, but eventually
adjusted its process enough to meet the appropriate alcohol levels. (The
company says it still does not pasteurize.) A few brands were back on
the shelves by the end of the summer; for others, including GT’s, it
took several months. Still, the stable of believers had grown strong
enough that the burgeoning industry survived.
Then came what
could’ve been a fatal blow: Just as sales started to recover from the
alcohol-related ban in September 2010, a woman in California sued the
GT’s parent company for personal injury brought on by false advertising.
“This lawsuit is intended to put an end to the deceptive, misleading,
unfair, unlawful labeling and advertising of GT’s Organic Raw Kombucha
and Synergy,” stated the complaint.
The woman had been drawn to
the product because the label promoted kombucha as “wonder drinks that
possess amazing health benefits.” She then discovered that “available
scientific evidence does not substantiate claims that kombucha-based
beverages ... possess any of those health benefits,” and that GT’s,
which had conducted no trials that would support the claims, was a
“scheme to deceive consumers.” The complaint concluded that she wouldn’t
have purchased the bottles if she’d known that the health claims were
not scientifically supported.
When a similar claim was filed
against Honest Kombucha, the label produced by Coca-Cola subsidiary
Honest Tea, Honest Tea settled out of court and discontinued the Honest
Kombucha line soon after. The reward was not enough for a corporation to
justify the risk. GT Dave, however, beholden only to himself, his
employees, and his customers, forged ahead, settling out of court while
continuing to tout kombucha as the miracle that saved his mother’s life.
By then, the story of kombucha as a cure for cancer hardly mattered;
for the general consumer, it was enough to know that kombucha might do
something for their health.
Perhaps the only kombucha study that meets today’s scientific standards came out in the September 2000 issue of Nutrition.
A team of researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks
department of psychology gave kombucha to a group of lab mice. Male mice
that drank kombucha lived 5 percent longer than males that didn’t drink
kombucha; for females, kombucha extended life by 2 percent. Kombucha
also inhibited weight gain, even though kombucha-drinking mice ate and
drank more than those that didn’t drink it. The authors speculated that
this could be due to the free xanthines — naturally occurring chemical
compounds with the same base as caffeine — in the kombucha stimulating
the metabolism. The tea leaves are likely the source of the xanthines,
as xanthines are found in green, black, and oolong tea. These results
were in line with anecdotal health claims, but that’s not all the study
found. The mice that were treated with kombucha also developed smaller
brains and larger livers and spleens, which are all associated with poor
health in humans.
Subsequent
studies on mice, rats, and human tissue cells have concluded that
antioxidant molecules and detoxifying agents that form during
fermentation — polyphenols, flavonoids, lactic and glucaric acids, and
others — may offer health benefits. A 2001 study showed that after
drinking kombucha for 15 days, rats exhibited less stress and had
healthier livers. According to one study, kombucha can fight off H. pylori,
the bacteria that causes 90 percent of stomach ulcers. There is some
additional evidence that kombucha might be useful in treating obesity
and diabetes. In 2012, researchers in Tunisia found that over the course
of 30 days, kombucha tea suppressed blood glucose levels of diabetic
rats by inhibiting pancreatic activity and easing the digestion of
carbohydrates. In both studies, kombucha delayed the absorption of LDL
cholesterol (the bad stuff) and increased that of HDL (the good stuff).
The researchers concluded that kombucha has cholesterol-lowering
effects. Still, these studies do little to explain what kombucha does in
the human body, as is true of all animal studies.
It’s
possible, too, that humans experience a placebo-like effect, or that
people drinking kombucha simply eat healthier in general. Until a
clinical study is done on humans, it’s impossible to say if any of these
findings pertain to our digestive process. It’s similarly impossible to
say that kombucha has detrimental effects on humans, despite efforts to
prove as much. The Journal of General Internal Medicine noted
in 1997 that two people had allergic reactions, one developed jaundice,
and one had nausea, vomiting, and head and neck pain after drinking
kombucha. But at the end of the report, the doctors noted, “We have no
evidence for the mechanisms of the side effects, or whether they are
related to the Kombucha [sic] or to a contaminant.” In 2004, a
53-year-old man developed severe muscle weakness about two weeks after
he started drinking a variant of kombucha involving milk. In 2009, a
22-year-old HIV-positive man developed hyperthermia, lactic acidosis,
and acute renal failure within hours of drinking kombucha. The
subsequent Journal of Intensive Care Medicine report warned
against consuming the drink. But all of these links were tenuous,
reaching the same conclusion as the investigation into Lila Mae
Williamson’s 1995 death: None definitively proved that kombucha was
dangerous.
Deering, who eventually left KWD and is now an
eighth-grade science teacher outside of Portland, has a theory for how
kombucha made it so far. He chalks up the incredible health claims to
the lack of nutrition in centuries past. “Through much of the time where
you have this association with it being a health tonic, nutrition was
not great,” he explains. “A lot of people were low on B vitamins.”
Fermentation produces B vitamins, so, he adds, it’s not surprising that
people felt healthier when they ate and drank foods that provided the
vitamins they lacked. It’s hard to say if kombucha really produces the
same health benefits today because there are fewer nutritional holes in
the modern Western diet. With a stilted laugh, Deering adds: “The best
health benefit is drinking kombucha instead of drinking soda pop. That
stuff is poison.” Dr. Oz, the cardiologist-turned-miracle-cure-peddler,
expressed a similar sentiment on an episode of his show, telling
viewers, “Swap soda for kombucha and you’ll lose 7 pounds this year,
with no effort.”
Until kombucha is studied more rigorously, says
Chassy, the food scientist, there is no reason to believe that it has
health benefits. Lee, who wrote a kombucha recipe book called Kombucha Revolution
published in 2014, thinks that studies will eventually support the
claims surrounding kombucha. But he doesn’t think it matters anymore. As
long as people continue to feel overwhelmed by the constant assault of
information that is modern life, it’s likely that the general public
will continue to choose intuition over scientific evidence. Experts are
on his side, predicting that annual kombucha sales will top $1.8 billion by 2020. That’s a lot of believers.
Ciara
Patras’s current physician won’t say that kombucha has helped her, but
the doctor is at least willing to write a prescription for kombucha when
Ciara is traveling, so that she’ll never be without the drink her
family believes saved her life. Where once Ruth had to ship SCOBYs and
kombucha brewing instructions to other desperate parents of children
battling biliary atresia, she can now just guide them to their local
supermarkets, where they can purchase their own pre-brewed bottles of
Ciara’s Kombucha. As kombucha made the jump from brewers’ basements to
the shelves of mainstream grocery chains, Patras launched the brand in
order to ensure that all consumers have access to “authentic” kombucha.
Ciara still drinks nearly 32 ounces of her namesake kombucha every day.
Unlike most people with biliary atresia, she has never needed a liver
transplant. “She doesn’t need treatments,” says Patras. “She just drinks
kombucha tea.”
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