Speaker 1 (00:10):
Kombucha. What are the health benefits, if any? All right, kombucha is getting all the craze for gut health, but is it really all that? Well, first of all, what is it? Well, kombucha is thought to originate in China or Japan. It’s made by adding specific strains of bacteria, yeast, or both, and sugar to black or green tea, and then allowing it to ferment for a week or more. Now, during this process, the bacteria and yeast form kind of a mushroom-like film on the surface of the liquid. This is why kombucha is also known as mushroom tea, because it kind of looks like the cap of a mushroom. Now, this blob is actually a living colony of bacteria and yeast, or a scobi. And this scobi can actually be then used to ferment a new batch of kombucha. So it’s kind of like a starter in sourdough bread.

(01:26):
In fact, it’s the exact same thing. Now, this fermentation process does a lot of really cool things. First of all, it makes a short chain fatty acid called acetic acid, which most of us know from vinegar and several other acidic compounds. It also has trace levels of alcohol, and the gases that are made with fermentation give it that kind of fizzy carbonation. There is trace amounts of alcohol, and it should say so on the label. Uh, you would virtually impossible for you to get drunk drinking kombucha. Uh, but there is alcohol, so buy or beware. Now, why is fermentation so interesting? First of all, almost all the oldest living people in the world use fermentation for many of their products. Think about way back when, there was no storage system for food, for anything, and the only way you could make it a storage-able product is fermentation.

(02:38):
The other thing that’s interesting studying ancient cultures is that most ancient cultures fermented even their grains and their beans. In fact, there’s some interesting conjecture that civilization started not because of bread, but because of beer. Now, if you think about it, if you’re crowded into a tight community and you’re all sick, uh, it’s not the bread that’s going to make you happy. It’s the beer that makes you happy. While both bread and beer are fermented, uh, one makes you potentially a whole lot happier than the other. So there’s an interesting conjecture that was actually the fermentation of grains into beer that fostered people tolerating living near each other. Think about that the next time you’re at the ballpark. Okay. We know that Egyptians actually were fermenting food 10,000 years ago. And once again, it looks like they were fermenting in the fertile crescent beer about 10 to 12,000 years ago.

(03:50):
Now, fermentation breaks down lectins. Hey, that’s a good thing. But fermentation uses a process of turning sugars into ATP energy called glycolysis. That’s a fairly inefficient process, but that’s how the sugar is used up. And that’s why to get fermentation going in the first place for green or black tea, you have to add sugar. Now, here’s the problem with most kombucha. Americans in general do not like tangy bitter flavors. We’re averse to the tanginess of fermented products like yogurt, like kombucha. So smart marketers cover up that tanginess by the addition of lots of sugar. Now, don’t get me wrong. You have to have sugar added to start the fermentation process, but after that, you add more sugar to cover up the tart taste. Some of these companies add so much sugar that there’s more sugar in healthy kombucha than there is in a bottle of soda.

(05:12):
So how do you figure out what’s what? First of all, look for added sugar. Now, almost all of these companies have to add sugar to start the process, but you don’t need much sugar to start the process. So if you see anything more than like five grams of sugar, buyer beware. Number two, look at the serving size. A lot of these come in a bottle or a can, and many of these have two to two and a half servings per container. So you have to double the amount of added sugar that you see on the label to see what you’re actually going to be drinking when you drain the whole thing, which is what most people do. If it tastes sweet, be very, very careful. It’s sweet for a reason, and that’s the added sugar. Now, don’t get me wrong, you can find kombucha with very little sugar, and there’s several of them, but please read the label.

(06:22):
Zip kombucha has very little sugar. It’s in Costco in a can, but Costco changes all the time. And I’ve been there when another kombucha was available, and unfortunately, that kombucha looked almost the same, but it had tons of added sugar. So just be careful. The other way around this is to use what are called water kefirs. Now, most people think of kefirs as milk-based fermented beverages, and for the most part they are. But you can also have a water kefir, and there’s a company that I like, I have no affiliation. They don’t pay me a sponsorship fee. I don’t get clicks from it called Kavita. And Kavita has a number of very low sugar water kefirs that I personally use and my wife loves. So there’s ways around getting fermented foods into you without all the sugar. Now, so why the rave about all this fermented foods?

(07:30):
Well, the good news is fermentation produces a lot of dead bacteria or yeast. You don’t have to have live probiotic cultures. The dead bacteria actually work just as well, if not better, than live living bacteria. These are now officially classified as postbiotics. And in the fermentation process, you get other postbiotics like short-chain fatty acids, like acetate, which actually foster the growth of good bacteria in your gut. In fact, there’s the famous Sonnenberg study from Stanford, the husband and wife team. They looked at healthy volunteers, and they gave them a lot of prebiotic fiber to eat, and they looked at their gut microbiome diversity, and the more diverse your gut microbiome, the better. And they looked at markers of inflammation in their blood. And lo and behold, despite all this prebiotic fiber, which gut bacteria love to eat, their gut bacteria diversity didn’t improve, and their markers of inflammation didn’t change.

(08:53):
What the heck? Well, in the second group, they gave them fermented foods, primarily yogurts and kefirs, and the prebiotic fiber. And lo and behold, with the addition of the fermented foods plus the fiber, their gut microbiome diversity improved, and their inflammatory markers went down. Basically confirming that you’ve got to prime the pump to get your gut bacteria to make the stuff that you want, which in this case is a really cool short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. And without precursors for butyrate, like acetate or propanate, another short-chain fatty acid from fermentation, you’re just not gonna do the job. So don’t worry about active live cultures. You don’t really care as long as the fermentation had, had taken place. Now, the other benefit of fermentation, tea, as you probably know, have a lot of really cool polyphenols, and you probably know by now that polyphenols are one of the preferred foods for gut bacteria.

(10:17):
But polyphenols are great for us, but we don’t absorb them very well. We need fermentation to activate polyphenols for us to absorb. So the fermentation that happens to the tea polyphenols actually makes them much more readily absorbable than just drinking a cup of tea. So it’s a win-win. You get postbiotics, you get fermented polyphenols, and you feed your good gut bacteria the things they’re looking for. There’s also an interesting study, finding that drinking kombucha regularly reduces liver toxicity. Now, why is that? It turns out liver toxicity is not from the compounds you eat. Sorry about that. It’s actually from leaky gut, and it’s actually from bacterial cell walls leaking through the wall of your gut. So kombucha worked in this case by improving gut wall health, by improving gut bacteria diversity, and that’s why liver toxicity was improved. So long story short, kombucha is a great fermented food with the proviso.

(11:39):
You gotta look at the sugar content. The lower the added sugar content, the better. And buyer beware if it tastes sweet. I got news for you. Put it back. It may taste delicious, but sugar, even in the form of kombucha, is your long-term enemy.

Speaker 2 (12:06):
I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Gundry Podcast. If you did, please share this with family and friends. You never know how one of these health tips can completely transform someone’s life when you take the time to share it with them. There’s also the Dr. Gundry Podcast YouTube channel, where we have tens of thousands of free health insights that can help you and your loved ones live a long, vital life. Let’s do this together.