Does fermented drink kombucha actually have health benefits?
Kombucha (pronounced kom-boo-cha) is produced by combining sweetened tea with "Scoby" - symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast - which looks like a flat beige mushroom, and leaving it in the back of a cupboard for a week or two. It has been quietly consumed for centuries in Russia and China, but only recently has its popularity soared.
While it might not sound great, it tastes better you think, particularly when brewed with flavour combinations like lemon grass and ginger or pomegranate and passion fruit.
Plus, it's all in the name of good health - or at least that's the belief. Kombucha devotees make many miraculous claims about the elixir, from preventing cancer, stimulating the immune system, improving digestion and liver function as well as bringing about hormonal balance.
There's only one problem: there is no medical evidence supporting these claims. So far, studies on kombucha consumption have been on rats, not humans.
A study published in looked at the effect of consuming kombucha on rats that had been induced into diabetes by a contaminant called alloxan. In the study, it was found that kombucha consumption effectively restored the alloxan-induced changes in the body. While black tea had the same effect, kombucha was found to be "more efficient".
In an earlier study, published in in 2010, researchers fed kombucha to mice with stomach ulcers. They found that black tea fermented for four days with a kombucha culture was as effective in treating the ulcers as the control medication, omeprazole. (Again, researchers also found regular black tea was effective, although, once again, not as effective as kombucha.)
