NEW (2024) Science on KOMBUCHA Tea Health Benefits | Is Kombucha ACTUALLY Good for Gut Health?

this is the number of new research articles published with the keyword kombucha in it so 2022 smashed all previous years in terms of new research about Kombucha Tea this video answers a simple question what is this new research telling us about Kombucha tea and specifically the health effects of Kombucha tea so throughout this video I cite all of this new research that just came out in the last couple years we have 70 7-0 citations that are gonna be popping up in this corner here we're going to talk about the ingredients of Kombucha we're going to talk about the fermentation which is key to understanding the health effects of Kombucha because you have new bioactive molecules formed during kombucha fermentation which is actually going to be what interacts with the cells systems and organs of our bodies right that's what mediates the health effects of Kombucha that's Parts one and two then we get right into what kombucha has been found to do to living systems whether it's mouse or human studies what are the effects on health finally we're going to end with where to be cautious with this new data with this massive body of evidence there are some things that I saw some inconsistencies with the methodologies of the studies just some little quirks about this big new data set that someone needs to keep in mind if you want to be honest about what this new data says right in general I am cautiously optimistic about Kombucha Tea right there's a lot to be optimistic about as we're going to talk about in a second but there are definitely some things to be cautious about too when interpreting this data without further Ado let's dive into the ingredients of Kombucha let's define what kombucha is and simply it really is three ingredients it's tea sugar and microbes basically during kombucha we Infuse the tea leaves then we add sugar and then we inoculate beneficial bacteria and yeast it's called the scoby it's kind of frankly kind of disgusting like in microbial slime that goes in the drink I'm still trying to get over the gross looking scoby thing I mean look childbirth is not pretty right but they call it the Miracle of Life I don't know try to get over the gross microbial slime mat thing let's look at that first ingredient which is tea regular viewers of this channel will know that tea can be a confusing word but if the very primary definition you have true Camellia sinensis teas that is from the tea plant and then you have all other teas which are called herbal teas which come from all the other non-tplant plants you technically in theory could make kombucha with either one but the true original kombucha that's been consumed for thousands of years now and the one with the most research and what seems to have the most health benefits is kombucha from real T right so that could be green tea black tea long tea any of the six major T types but it needs to come from real tea and some of this new research is showing the difference between true tea kombucha and herbal tea kombucha and basically what they're finding is just that there's a ton of antioxidants that are unique to tea leaves that when you make kombucha from real tea leaves these antioxidants are then transferred over carried over into the Kombucha tea when you use herbal tea for kombucha you just don't have the same levels of antioxidants it's like the same things that make normal tea leaves a normal tea true tea healthy to consume they carry over into the kombucha one of the recent studies actually had this really cool title it was talking to the fact that kombucha is this double power of Tea Leaf antioxidants and the microbes that you inoculate with the tea leaves there were some studies that compared which T-Type is best for kombucha you see clear differences right one study compared green versus black back you had another study comparing green tea white tea Purity and black tea kombuchas these studies all found significant differences and the kombuchas all had their own unique properties about them but it's unclear which provided the most health benefits and for people who know about tea you know there's so much variability in the world of tea so just differentiating based on green tea or black tea doesn't really help a lot because you can have really high grade green teas or low-grade green teas same with every major T-Type for now we know that Realty kombucha is better than herbal tea kombucha but we don't know much more than that in terms of what tea is going to provide the most health benefits for kombucha now the next ingredient is sugar right and so sugar as you can imagine just like when you ferment alcohol with sugar the the sugar type that you use makes a huge difference on the bioactive properties and the flavor and the the chemical composition of the final kombucha Brew right so this one really cool study from 2022 used three different T types it was green black and white and it used two sugar types coconut sugar and cane sugar so six total types of Kombucha they found some really interesting things about how sugar type affected the Kombucha Tea in terms of the antimicrobial properties right they tested the kombucha's ability to fight pathogens of the human gut kombucha made from cane sugar was able to fight specific pathogens really well much better than coconut sugar and the opposite was also true there were other pathogens bacterial and fungal pathogens of the gut that were fought by kombucha made from coconut sugar and not cane sugar so it wasn't obvious which was the more antimicrobial kombucha both of them had distinct properties fighting their own subsets of pathogens on the flip side of that you kind of have the beneficial microbes from the scoby that were supported by different sugar types right so the sugar is not only affecting the antimicrobial properties but it's affecting the probiotic properties of the kombucha by supporting specific beneficial microbial communities because the the microbes are consuming the sugar during fermentation and some of these microbes are picky eaters right so some microbes that are beneficial will only eat the cane sugar some will only eat the coconut sugar so you found in the final kombucha teas regardless of T-Type you found that the sugar type significantly changed which beneficial communities were present in the final Kombucha Tea again it wasn't clear which one was quote unquote better they were just different you can see sugar type has a big role in affecting the bioactivity of the Kombucha tea so the third major major ingredient is the scoby right what microbes are you inoculating into the Kombucha tea so the scoby that includes yeast and bacteria two groups of micro robes you can see here these are the common yeasts found in Kombucha Tea they are great at fermenting and they have high stress tolerance so as the pH declines with kombucha fermentation these microbes these fungi are allowed to continue doing their work continue fermenting so they're kind of like powerhouses of Kombucha fermentation and then kind of Downstream down the assembly line from these kombucha yeasts you have kombucha bacteria and so they take the products of fermentation from the yeast and they further convert them and change them into new beneficial bioactive compounds for example the yeast are producing ethanol right that's that's the active ingredient and booze in case you're drunk we don't really want too much of that in the Kombucha Tea not great for health not great for the liver specifically acetic acid bacteria take that ethanol that the yeast produce and they convert it into acetic acid which is a health promoting organic acid right so they're taking a not so great thing turning it into a great thing and you can see now there's molecules from the sugar and the tea that are being passed off between the microbes and then converted into a really Health promoting profile of bioactive ingredients so aside from acetic acid bacteria there's lactic acid bacteria that's the second big group of bacteria in the scoby these are really anti-oxidative anti-inflammatory but interestingly they can help promote mood actually they're calming and anti-anxiety microbial communities right they interact with us through something called the gut brain axis where if you have certain microbes in your gut it promotes calmness and reduces stress levels which is crazy right the gut brain axis is this massive New Frontier that has everyone's job on the floor lactic acid bacteria in the scoby are also producing bacteriosins which is an antibacterial antimicrobial compound it's how microbes fight other microbes so these are going to be what are actually conferring that antimicrobial effect against the pathogens of the gut that we were just talking about so these microbes they are converting the sugar and the tea creating new compounds that fight pathogens and interacting with us and so many different unique cool ways so those are the three ingredients tea sugar and microbes right and you can see how there's huge variability in each one of those that can significantly affect the chemical composition and the bioactivity of the final Kombucha tea at the end when we talk about what to be cautious about in terms of this new research this is kind of the Crux of it where there's so much variability in Kombucha and the ingredients and how a final Kombucha tea can be that you need to be cautious about claiming things and interpreting certain data that you find about Kombucha Tea okay so let's get into fermentation this is kind of where all the magic happens this is when these three raw ingredients all interact and play off each other and coalesce to create this incredible Kombucha tea that is greater than the sum of its parts right when these three ingredients combined and ferment with each other there's brand new bioactive compounds being created the first one of these bioactive compounds that is created was mind-blowing I had never heard of this before I did this research for this video it's something called bacterial cellulose I want to show you one figure here so these are the terms that are found in association with the term kombucha in this whole body of research that we're talking about now so besides just kombucha what aspects of Kombucha are researchers studying and Publishing papers about so you have the subsection over here that includes you know health effects and antioxidants of Kombucha Tea that's a huge subsection of what people are looking at you have another subsection up here which is the probiotics the gut health promoting aspect which is kind of related to the health but a little bit different and then down here this third major section of things related to kombucha that people are studying is all about bacterial cellulose which is crazy because it's basically just as big as the whole world of Health promoting effects of Kombucha itself right so what the heck is bacterial cellulose basically in the scoby there's microbes that are taking individual glucose molecules that derive from the sugar that we put in the tea and they are glomming together individual glucose molecules into a long polymer chain at a rate of 200 000 glucose molecules per second per bacterial cell into these extremely long Ultra Pure glucose polymers called bacterial cellulose it's like this crazy thing because plants also produce cellulose but plant cellulose is thick crude and impier whereas bacterial cellulose is extremely pure extremely strong and even thinner and so it's almost uh it reminded me for the token fans out there reminded me of like a mithril like a bacterial mithril because it's really bioactive and there's all this new research looking into potential biomedical applications of this bacterial cellulose and it turns out that kombucha is like basically the number one source of this compound in the human diet it was first hypothesized in 2008 that this BC was really maybe one of the important bioactive compounds in Kombucha that is going to be mediating a lot of the health effects that we observe in association with kombucha consumption and then now new research is coming out and confirming that yeah this bacterial cellulose has a ton of unique effects on the human body including wound healing I saw some research about that and just general support of beneficial microbial communities in the gut so that's kind of a frontier of research definitely something to keep an eye out for okay so besides BC we have a ton of organic acids being produced and if you've ever had kombucha before you will notice that um kind of twangy that Tangy kind of Tangy twangy Tang that it's got going on that is organic acids that is acetic acid and glucuronic acid those are the big organic acids being produced during kombucha fermentation especially acetic acid the levels of acetic acid during kombucha fermentation rise 450 fold they just Skyrocket because you have all these acetic acid bacteria they're consuming the sugar and their populations just Skyrocket during kombucha fermentation and this acetic acid has a ton of health benefits it has a lot of a lot of different bioactive properties about it they can combat a lot of the bacterial pathogens that we were just talking about and do some other cool things too the other organic acid is called glucuronic acid this mediates the detoxifying properties of Kombucha tea so basically through a process called glucuronidation this glucuronic acid gets tagged onto toxins in the liver and then once it attaches to the toxins it can kindly escort those toxins out of the body right so it's the it's one of the main Pathways of detoxification and Kombucha tea is loaded in glucuronic acid in fact if you look at glucuronic acid on Wikipedia you got Kombucha Tea right there in the basic description as one of the main sources of this detoxifying compound in the human diet the next big ingredient formed during fermentation are these phenolic compounds right they're fragments and splinters of the original Tea Leaf polyphenol compounds so in tea leaves you have these larger polyphenols like egcg or theoflavens depending on which T-Type you use and during fermentation they're getting broken down and splintered into many different smaller unique phenolic compounds so in normal unfermented tea you might have a few dozen polyphenol types and in Kombucha you they measured recently over 100 different types of these smaller unique phenolics and these have antioxidant properties which we know are great for health next during kombucha fermentation you have vitamins and minerals being formed from scratch by the microbes which is fascinating so one of the recent studies was that one that used six different kombuchas three T types and two sugar types they examine the levels of available magnesium calcium and potassium at day 0 7 and 14 of fermentation and they found for all the T types all the sugar types that these three critical essential minerals increased significantly from Day Zero to seven to fourteen also vitamin C and different B vitamins are increasing significantly right these these microbes are actually creating these vitamins from scratch during kombucha fermentation they're feeding off the sugar and they create all these things that we need you know I don't even really need to elaborate on the health benefits of vitamins and minerals that is just the very most basic thing that you should have in your diet now let's pivot into directly what kombucha was found to do to health what exactly have they found to happen to Health in a living system whether it's humans or mice or other animals when they consume kombucha right and rather than talking about a million different organs and Health Systems in the body I want to focus on one aspect of Health that I find the most interesting and also had the most data supporting it in terms of Kombucha Tea research and that was the gut right how does Kombucha Tea affect gut health and specifically the gut microbiome so in order for something to help the gut microbiome it needs to do two things it needs to support beneficial communities and it needs to suppress harmful communities right so how is Kombucha Tea fairing in those two tasks let's look at suppressing harmful communities right we already talked about um that's delicious I'm drinking a raw puer by the way and this is white tea I'm double fisting today for some reason well I know which reason because I just like drinking tea so that's the reason we already mentioned in terms of suppressing harmful communities there are several antimicrobial anti-pathogenic compounds in Kombucha Tea we have the bacteriosins that we mentioned that were produced by lactic acid bacteria we have the phenolic compounds which are the residual Tea Leaf polyphenols that are antibacterial you have acetic acid we have vitamins and minerals which are indirect suppressors of pathogens because they are cofactors or helper molecules for the immune system to function properly and then you also have the beneficial communities that you're consuming that take residence in the gut and then they kind of compete with the bad guys for resources so they're inhibiting suppressing bad bacteria through competition with them so those are five mechanisms through which Kombucha tea is suppressing harmful bacteria in the gut in terms of supporting beneficials there's two ways that kombucha is doing this you have probiotic effects and Prebiotic effects you have probiotic is when you consume the microbes themselves and Prebiotic is when you consume the food for those microbes that allow those beneficial microbes to then Thrive and proliferate so let's look at the first one the key thing in a probiotic is whether these microbes that you consume can actually survive the harsh environment of the stomach right you have a pH of two low oxygen weird air pressure systems down there so it's not like you can just consume any old microbe and it's going to thrive in this insanely acidic and weird environment but this these researchers from 2022 made this in really interesting observation which is that if a microbe can survive kombucha fermentation conditions then it can likely survive in the gut right because kombucha fermentation is also super low PH has all these weird really harsh environmental conditions about it that actually almost mimics some of those harsh environmental conditions of the gut the kombucha fermentation process it's like but odds for the microbial Navy Seals of the gut there's one study from 2022 that was able to track the series of events that occurred as a result of probiotics from kombucha taking residents up in the gut and it basically proceeded in this order you have the beneficial communities they take residence they increase that caused the intestinal cells of the mouse to produce more tight Junction proteins those are the proteins that hold together the intestinal lining as a result of that the Integrity of the intestinal barrier improved you have less leakage of inflammatory molecules from the gut into circulation so systemic inflammation decreased glucose tolerance improved and liver damage was reduced so you have this huge series of events that was tracked and traced and found to begin with beneficial microbes from Kombucha Tea taking residents up in the gut these studies show that kombucha Could Be an Effective probiotic right so Prebiotic tea has different phytonutrients different compounds that feed beneficial microbes some authors have said that these are T polyphenols other authors recently said they're T alkaloids alkaloids are like the caffeine and related caffeine looking compounds in tea so it's unclear what T compound is fueling The Beneficial microbes the most but we have observed in humans and in mice that tea consumption does increase the level of beneficial microbes in the gut through Prebiotic Effects by fueling and feeding these microbes with these unique Tea Leaf phytonutrients so all this we can look at and and now answer the question does Kombucha Tea support a healthy gut with a fair degree of confidence now looking at all this new data we can say yes it does because it suppresses harmful bacteria through direct suppression from bacteriosins acetic acids all these antimicrobial compounds it suppresses bad bugs through competitive inhibition with them provides good bugs that out compete those bad bugs it improves beneficial communities through Prebiotic effects and improves beneficial communities through probiotic effects so for those four reasons I am optimistic that consuming Kombucha tea is good for your gut microbiome good for gut health let's talk about where caution is necessary right we've talked about why I'm optimistic and why I think that you should be optimistic about what this new data says about kombucha but where are my red flags with this data set so to speak where where do I think you should be cautious when interpreting all this new information the first thing is that like I said all these compounds are really variable and the fermentation conditions are also variable one of these studies from 2022 they took all of the kombucha fermentation conditions of all the other previous research articles to date and they compiled them all together in this huge table and across all these different research studies you can see 5x variations in these really important parameters like tea concentration sugar concentration time and temperature so the kombucha making parameters of all these studies are not standardized you can imagine study X they're making kombucha with three grams of green tea 10 grams of sugar for 14 days at 30 Celsius you have study why 10 grams of black tea three grams of sugar different time different temperature fermentation and then the studies produce different results there's different findings well of course there's different findings because nothing about the kombucha production process was standardized the other huge thing is that the quality of the Tea Leaf determines the quality of the Kombucha Tea in terms of bioactivity and effects on health I took data from one of these recent studies and I ran my own regression analysis on this data and I found that polyphenol content in the final kombucha was entirely dependent on the polyphenol content in the original tea leaves right so really antioxidant Rich tea made really antioxidant Rich kombucha and vice versa that is an issue because across a sample set of 30 different T's there were tenfold variations in polyphenol content across the six different t-types right this is all within Camellia census T these are just different samples of the six major T types that is a warning sign because that means you can have 10x variations in antioxidant capacity in your Kombucha Tea if you buy store-bought kombucha you have no idea what was the quality of the tea leaves they're using and chances are if it's a big company they're using the lowest quality tea that they can get so that is something to look out for another big caution is that transport and storage of Kombucha can significantly reduce the amount of living probiotics in the Kombucha Tea one study showed that by The Eighth Day of storage the lactic acid bacteria were only less than one percent of their original community population number you know the longer kombucha is sitting on the shelf or in storage especially it may be not optimal temperatures or light conditions you have these beneficial microbes dying off basically and so that takes a huge part of what's good about kombucha off the table when you're losing these probiotics just because a kombucha was bioactive when it left the factory doesn't mean it's bioactive when you buy it on the supermarket shelf next there's an extremely small amount of human data about Kombucha tea and all the good research articles made note of this I saw one article from 2018 that tried to do a systematic review of all the human data on kombucha up until that point and they found and published that there was only one human study at that time that number has probably grown a little bit since then but even today there's a really small number of human trials on Kombucha Tea again this doesn't disprove anything right a lack of human data you can't take that and then repudiate all the information that we have but it's just something to keep in mind I had looked at all these problems with storage transport potentially low-grade tea leaves making low-grade kombucha and I thought that a good way around all of that would be to brew your own kombucha at home there's tons of really cool kombucha Brewing guides actually here on YouTube I'll include some references and resources in the description but if you brew your own kombucha you can choose high grade tea leaves that are really antioxidant Rich you can experiment with different sugar types you can get a good organic scoby and then you can not have to transport it over long periods of time and space and then you can really preserve all those probiotics but before you start brewing your own kombucha you're going to want to know which tea to use and there is a world a world of t-types at your disposal to choose from to start brewing your own kombucha luckily for you I have a guide to the universe of the six t types and the subtypes of those types is chapter one of my recent master class on T that's eight chapters long I highly recommend clicking on this link right here checking out that video exploring diving into all these different T types and subtypes investigating for yourself which one might make the best kombucha smash that like button smash that subscribe button and I will see you in the next video

Channel: Wu Mountain Tea

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Id: uGRCPfqooBk

Length: 26min 30sec (1590 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 29 2023