Is Kombucha Tea Good for You?

Tea is healthy; mushrooms are healthy. What if you put them together? Kombucha tea, a fizzy fermented drink—complete with chunks of slimy fungus.

Now, if you base your nutrition knowledge on the kinds of books you find in health food stores, bestsellers like Kombucha—Miracle Fungus will tell you that already by the Tsin dynasty, it was known and honored as a beverage with magical powers, enabling people to live forever. Given the fact that you don’t tend to meet many people from the Tsin dynasty these days, not only may kombucha not give you eternal life—it apparently won’t even grant you a measly 2,000 years. Never believe anything you read in health food stores.

But what does the science say? Kombucha tea—harmful, just harmless, or helpful? Kombucha tea can be harmful. Published last year in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine, kombucha “may pose serious health risks. Consumption of this tea should be discouraged, as it may be associated with life-threatening lactic acidosis.”

This is just the latest in a series of case reports of people ending up in a coma because their blood turned to acid after drinking kombucha. How does it do that? We have no idea. Maybe it’s a magical fungus after all.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by veganmontreal.

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• J Intensive Care Med. 2009 May-Jun;24(3):205-7. A case of Kombucha tea toxicity. SungHee Kole A, Jones HD, Christensen R, Gladstein J.

• acid/base balance
• beverages
• fermented foods
• health food stores
• kombucha tea
• lifespan
• longevity
• mold
• mortality
• nutrition myths
• probiotics
• supplements
• tea