Diet Archives

Almonds may help Boost your Gut Health

In the world of nutrition, there’s little doubt that almonds are among the most popular, delicious and healthy foods to eat.

A single cup of raw almonds (143 grams) provides a surplus of measurable benefits from a variety of vital nutrients, including calcium, niacin, vitamin E, magnesium, potassium, phosphorus, protein and fiber, according to the USDA’s National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.

Chock full of unsaturated fats, almonds have also been associated with a growing number of health benefits, from reducing the risk of heart disease to lowering two of the markers linked to metabolic syndrome and promoting satiety (feeling full after eating).

As the positive health news has spread (with much help from the Almond Board of California), the profile of almonds has risen exponentially, along with the number of products sold at your neighborhood grocery store.

In fact, almonds lead the pack in new food products worldwide by a sizeable margin (9.7 percent) and over all nuts combined (7.1 percent), which may explain why you’ve been seeing more brands of almond milk sitting next to traditional milk products.

Almonds: Food for the Gut

A recent study funded by the Almond Board of California has discovered one more healthy reason to eat almonds and almond skins. Almonds serve as prebiotics—non-digestible carbohydrates/plant fiber that feed the good bacteria already living in the gut.

In this study, patients boosted amounts of Bifidobacteria and Lactobacillus in the human gut significantly after eating almonds or almond skins for just six weeks.

Scientists monitored the health of 48 healthy patients (ages 18-22) who supplemented their daily diets with 56 grams (almost 2 ounces) of almonds, 10 grams of almond skins or 8 grams of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS), a natural substance derived from plant sugars that’s used as a prebiotic in products like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic.

During the six-week observation period, the collective gut bacteria of volunteers were affected positively but at different times.

For example, groups who ate almond skins or FOS enjoyed increased amounts of Lactobacillus and Bifidobacteria from the beginning. On the other hand, those who consumed roasted almonds didn’t experience growth in good gut bacteria like the other groups until week six. By the end of the study, both almond groups reached the same elevated levels of good gut bacteria.

Additionally, the gut health benefits linked to eating almond skins lasted two additional weeks after the six-week period ended.

One more benefit from eating roasted almonds or almond skins: Levels of Clostridium perfringens, a spore-forming, gram-positive bacterium that contributes to food poisoning, were greatly reduced.

However, before you start loading up on almonds, be aware that up to 80 percent of this nut is fat, so you should eat them in moderation.

When looking for a good probiotic, be sure it contains FOS or another proven prebiotic that feeds the healthy bacteria in your gut, like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic or EndoMune Advanced Junior (for kids) with multiple strains of beneficial bacteria.

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Dietary changes may affect your gut health, triggering auto-inflammatory bone disease

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

As you know, the diversity of bacteria in your gut—specifically the lack of it—can be an indicator of serious health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, colon cancer and obesity.

Moreover, your daily diet plays an important role in the makeup of your gut bacteria, which influences your susceptibility to health problems like auto-inflammatory bone disease, according to a study recently published in Nature.

Scientists at St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital studied mice with chronic recurrent multifocal osteomyelitis (CRMO), an inflammatory childhood bone disorder. These test animals had mutated Pstpip2 genes whose presence leads to osteomyelitis (an infection inside a bone).

During their research, scientists discovered changing the nutritional balance of test animals affected the makeup of their gut bacteria positively and negatively. Among the bacteria affected by diet variations was Prevotella, which has been linked to inflammatory problems in humans like arthritis, periodontal disease and osteomyelitis.

For example, one beneficial diet scientists tested limited the growth of Prevotella by reducing amounts of Interleukin-1 beta chemicals. (For this study, the supply of Interleukin-1 beta chemical was affected in specific immune cells called neutrophils, chemicals that are the biggest type of white blood cells in mammals that form an essential part of the innate immune system.)

“While multiple lines of evidence have suggested that diet can impact human disease, the scientific mechanism involved was a mystery,” said Dr. Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti of St. Jude’s Department of Immunology.

“Our results show that diet can influence immune-mediated disorders by shaping the composition of the gut microbiome, which our findings suggest play a role in immune regulation.”

The intestinal connection between osteomyelitis and the gut microbiome was verified when scientists successfully treated test mice fed a disease-promoting diet, first, with an array of broad-spectrum antibiotics, then, by transplanting the microbiomes of healthy mice to sicker, genetically modified mice.

“The results suggest probiotics might provide a more targeted method for suppressing production of [Interleukin-1 beta] and protecting against autoimmune diseases,” said Dr. John Lukens, according to a press release.

Often, our go-go-go lifestyles don’t leave us much time to eat healthy, nutrient-rich diets that promote good gut health and boost our collective immune systems.

That’s why taking a probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic or EndoMune Advanced Junior (for kids) with multiple strains of beneficial bacteria, is so important and beneficial in protecting your health naturally.

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Good gut health allows chocolate to sharpen your brain

Diet, Mental Health / By @drHoberman

Earlier this year, you learned how eating polyphenol-rich dark chocolate can benefit your health and why your gut plays an important role in that process.

In fact, the presence of Bifidobacteria, one of 10 beneficial strains contained in EndoMune Advanced Probiotic and EndoMune Advanced Junior (for kids), and lactic acid bacteria is the primary reason eating dark chocolate produces healthy, anti-inflammatory compounds.

These same beneficial microbes also create the opportunity for healthy older folks to reverse age-related declines in memory, according to a recent study published by Nature Neuroscience.

An important thing to note: The declines in memory due to age that are being discussed here are far different than those experienced by folks who suffer more serious health challenges due to Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia that destroys neurons throughout the brain.

On the other hand, age-related declines in memory—forgetting a phone number or where you parked a car—usually start in early adulthood, becoming more noticeable as people approach their 50s or 60s.

Scientists at Columbia University Medical Center studied the effects of consuming dietary cocoa flavanols to confirm that age-related declines in memory were located in the portion of the brain known as the dentate gyrus (inside the hippocampus).

For the study, 37 healthy participants ranging in age from 50-69 received either a low flavanol drink (10 mg.) or a high flavanol drink (900 mg.) daily for three months. Before and after the study, patients were given memory tests, and their brains were scanned to measure the amount of blood in and the type of memories controlled by the dentate gyrus.

Patients who were given the high flavanol drink experienced terrific results compared to those receiving the low flavanol mixture.

“If a participant had the memory of a typical 60-year-old at the beginning of the study, after three months, that person on average had the memory of a typical 30- or 40-year-old,” said Dr. Scott Small, according to a press release.

Interestingly, the high flavanol product used in this study, produced by global confectionary manufacturer Mars, isn’t the same as chocolate, which is why researchers caution people not to increase their chocolate intake to replicate the effect.

In fact, attempting to eat that much chocolate rich in epicatechin (a healthy flavanol also found in tea and grapes), you’d have to eat at least 300 grams of dark chocolate a day, amounting to seven average bars.

Also, scientists reported no additional activity in the entorhinal cortex, another region in the hippocampus that’s affected early in the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

For this high flavanol drink to work so well in these experiments, it has to be “processed” by intestinal bacteria so that the active agents are absorbed and work to improve the brain’s ability to retain memories.

The real story “behind” the study: To enjoy these chocolatey benefits, ensure that you have a healthy gut by taking a quality multi-species probiotic like EndoMune Advanced.

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Artificial sweeteners may harm your gut health

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

Earlier this year, we explained how poor gut health can be one underlying factor that contributes to the epidemic of obesity plaguing our country.

So, you start on the right track by getting the right amount of exercise and sleep, cutting down on fatty foods, and switching from products containing real sugar to those made with non-caloric artificial sweeteners (to liven up that early morning infusion of java).

Unfortunately, those artificial sweeteners—specifically sucralose (sold in America as Splenda), aspartame (Nutrasweet and Equal) and saccharine (Necta Sweet or Sweet‘N Low)—may have the opposite effect, according to research published in the journal Nature.

Scientists from the Weizman Institute of Science’s Department of Immunology (Israel) made the discovery after feeding 10-week-old mice one of several diets (normal or high-fat) and water laced with one of the artificial sweeteners mirroring amounts sanctioned by the FDA, plain water or water mixed with glucose.

Eleven weeks later, the test animals exhibited signs of glucose intolerance, an indicator signaling several metabolic conditions including adult-onset diabetes or metabolic syndrome. What’s more, repeating the same test with different mice and different amounts of artificial sweeteners produced the very same results.

How test animals react to artificial sweeteners

Then, researchers tested a theory that the gut’s reaction to artificial sweeteners may be triggering glucose intolerance, because our bodies don’t recognize the sugar as food, using only saccharin. Interestingly, they found saccharin isn’t absorbed by the gut but does have contact with the gut bacteria in mice, which triggers glucose intolerance.

Other signs that gut bacteria was affected by artificial sweeteners:

Treating the mice with antibiotics reversed the process completely.
Transferring the microbiota of mice harmed by artificial sweeteners to sterile mice conferred the same results to the new animals.
DNA sequencing revealed contact with saccharin affected the diversity of gut bacteria.
Even placing the affected gut microbiota outside the bodies of sterile mice along with artificial sweeteners was enough to induce glucose intolerance.

How YOUR gut reacts to artificial sweeteners

Lastly, researchers at the Weisman Institute turned to data collected from The Personalized Nutrition Project, the largest human trial to study the connections between the human gut microbiota and nutrition.

Based just on the reporting of some 400 people (at this time only from Israel) participating in the project, scientists discovered a significant connection between their gut bacteria, self-reported consumption of artificial sweeteners and clinical signs of glucose intolerance.

Finally, scientists recruited seven fit and health volunteers who didn’t use artificial sweeteners to incorporate the maximum daily amount of it in their diets for seven days. The gut health of four patients changed to a balance associated with the propensity for metabolic diseases, while the remaining three weren’t affected at all.

Why were some volunteers affected, but others weren’t? Specific bacteria in the guts of those who developed glucose intolerance reacted to the fake sugar by secreting substances that triggered an inflammatory response similar to sugar overdose, thus promoting changes in the body’s ability to metabolize sugar, said Dr. Eran Elinav.

Even more compelling: Treating mice with gut bacteria of volunteers whose gut bacteria developed glucose intolerance triggered the same result.

Taking a probiotic protects your gut

“Our relationship with our own individual mix of gut bacteria is a huge factor in determining how the food we eat affects us,” said Dr. Elinav in a press release. “Especially intriguing is the link between use of artificial sweeteners—through the bacteria in our guts—to a tendency to develop the very disorders they were designed to prevent; this calls for reassessment of today’s massive, unsupervised consumption of these substances.”

Because the effect of artificial sweeteners wasn’t universal, it’s possible that probiotics could be used to shift gut bacteria in order to reverse the damage done by glucose intolerance, said Dr. Eran Segal, Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the Weizman Institute to the New York Times.

Because your gut bacteria can change very quickly based on the good and bad foods you eat, it’s more important than ever to take a probiotic, like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic or EndoMune Advanced Junior (for kids), containing multiple strains of beneficial bacteria for your good gut health.

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Is the Paleo diet good for your gut and losing weight?

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

Think about that bad morning when you got ready for work and nothing in your closet fit. You had been losing the battle of the bulge for so long that you were willing to consider extreme dieting fads just to fit into those old but favorite clothes.

Perhaps, that desperation has led you to consider the Paleolithic diet, better known as the Paleo diet, based on what scientists speculated cavemen/women ate during that era, ending some 10,000 years ago.

Some experts (Loren Cordain, Ph.D. and Robb Wolf) assume that shunning the many unhealthy staples of the Western diet—dairy products, processed foods filled with extra salt and sugars, carbs, starches, and grains—for a more basic diet made up of lean meats, fish, fruits and vegetables and “good” fats can be a healthier way to lose weight.

Unfortunately, the Paleo diet isn’t open to everyone. Vegans aren’t allowed in the party due to their specific dietary restrictions (no eggs, seafood or meat), plus Paleo dieters aren’t allowed to eat veggie sources of protein (beans and other legumes).

So, despite its limitations, does the Paleo diet really work? A study published by the American Society of Microbiology earlier this year that compared the gut microbes of humans and animals questioned the Paleo diet’s ability to suppress hunger.

A scientist at Imperial College London compared fecal bacteria samples taken from human vegans to those from gelada baboons, the only modern primate that mostly eats grass.

Then, researchers fed the samples one of two diets—a predigested grassy, high-fiber diet or a predigested potato, high-starch diet—then tracked the changes in bacteria.

Interestingly, human cultures fed the potato diet by scientists produced the best results: High levels of short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), chemicals associated with triggering appetite-suppressing gut hormone peptides.

What’s more, baboon cultures fed the potato diet produced more SCFAs than those given grass. When some of these potato cultures were added to the colon cells of mice, the animal cells produced appetite-suppressing, gut hormone peptide YY (PYY).

Simply put, these results demonstrate the belief among many dietary experts that the appetite suppression connected with following a Paleo diet may not be entirely accurate, or that plant-based, high-fiber diets may not increase the presence of SCFAs or inhibit appetites after all.

If you want to overcome obesity and improve your health, eating like Fred and Wilma Flintstone may not help you very much.

Along with eating the right foods and starting an exercise plan, taking a multi-species probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic will increase the diversity of bacteria in your gut that will assist you in beating obesity and improving your health for the long term by helping to produce the SCFAs that decrease your appetite.

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Gut bacteria can change very quickly

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

If you read our blog regularly, you appreciate how good gut health, supported by taking a multi-species probiotic, affects the overall quality of your bodily health, from lowering your blood pressure to obesity.

However, an important part of treating any health condition is knowing how long it will take before your health returns to normal.

A pair of American studies published this year have concluded the human gut microbiome is uniquely flexible and may change in as little as a single day, a good thing to know when monitoring health problems like inflammatory bowel disease.

The microbial shift between diets is fast!

In one study published in Nature, Harvard University scientists tested the composition of gut bacteria on humans after discovering how flexible and responsive the microbiomes of mice were each day.

Researchers tested their premise on nine human volunteers who were prescribed radically different diets for five days with a break in between them. (The gut health of the nine patients was tested before, during and after each diet.)

The first diet centered on meats and cheeses—ribs, eggs and bacon—then followed after a break by a high-fiber diet focused on plant-based foods—granola, lentils, fruits, rice and vegetables.

“The relative abundance of various bacteria species looked like it shifted within a day after the food hit the gut,” Duke University researcher Lawrence David told Nutraingredients-usa.com.

After three days on each diet, the collective behavior of human microbiota had changed along with the way gut bacteria behaved.

Checking your microbiota easy as checking out an iPhone app

MIT researchers came up with similar findings, published in Genome Biology, and were helped with the use of an iPhone app.

The two study participants were monitored for a full year via the collection of daily stool samples and tracking various health measures (sleep, exercise, emotions, diet) using an iPhone app.

“On any given day, the amount of one species could change manyfold, but after a year, that species would still be at the same median level,” explained Eric Alm, MIT associate professor and senior author of the paper. “To a large extent, the main factor we found that explained a lot of that variance was the diet.”

For example, increases in dietary fiber matched boosts in Roseburia, Eubacterium rectale and Bifidobacterium (one of the species contained in EndoMune Advanced Probiotic and EndoMune Advanced Junior).

During the yearlong study period, both subjects became sickened, which changed their gut bacteria considerably. In both cases, the relationship between specific groups of bacteria and diet occurred in one day.

While living in a developing country, one patient experienced a two-week bout of diarrhea and severe problems with his microbiota. However, once he returned stateside, his microbiota recovered and returned to its original composition.

Interestingly, the second patient experienced food poisoning fueled by Salmonella. During that time, Salmonella levels tripled to 30 percent of the gut microbiome while the Firmicutes phylum of beneficial bacteria almost vanished.

Beneficial levels of Firmicutes bacteria increased with the patient’s recovery to some 40 percent, but the strains were different from those present at the start.

The long-term goal of this research, said Dr. Alm, is to ease the data collection process so patients suffering from inflammatory bowel syndrome or other diseases could be fitted with a personalized monitoring system that warns them ahead of a flare-up so it can be avoided.

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A probiotic every day keeps listeria away!

Diet, Disease, Probiotics / By @drHoberman

The norovirus isn’t the only infectious disease sneaking up to harm the health of unsuspecting Americans.

Over the past six months, America’s once safe food supply—from whole foods including plums, peaches and nectarines to processed foods like bagged salads, cheeses, salsa, peanut butter, fruit pies, hummus and pre-packaged meals—has been plagued by the harmful foodborne L. monocytogenes bacterium, better known as listeria.

Unfortunately, this latest outbreak of listeria doesn’t have any boundaries, as major grocers, including Target, Trader Joe’s, BJ’s, Costco, Hy-Vee, Sam’s Club, Whole Foods, Wegmans and Giant Eagle, have sold foods that have been recalled due to potential contamination.

Listeria popped up on the radar of food safety experts and consumers most notably in 2011 when an outbreak infected cantaloupes grown at Colorado-based Jensen Farms that sickened 147 Americans in 28 states, including 40 in the Centennial state.

Of those who were sickened, 33 people died and a pregnant woman suffered a miscarriage, culminating in the worst foodborne outbreak in the U.S. in at least a century.

The human targets of listeria

Listeria is a very hardy bacteria—it can survive even in refrigerated and freezing environments—and is very common in our environment, yet very few Americans (1,600) are sickened by it annually.

Symptoms range from the light—fever, muscle aches, nausea and diarrhea—to the more serious—headaches, stiff neck, loss of balance, confusion and convulsions—and the incubation period could stretch out to 70 days. Yet, pregnant women may only feel a mild flu.

However, in the right environments, listeria can be very deadly, as it is the third leading cause of death from food poisoning. Patients at the greatest risk of harm:

Pregnant women and their newborns
People with weakened immune systems
Seniors age 65 and older

The six ways to avoid listeria infections

The good news: People who are prone to develop more serious problems due to listeria or other food poisoning issues can take some very simple steps to avoid them:

Avoid unpasteurized (raw) milk or soft cheeses.
Refrigerate any leftovers within two hours and reuse them in no longer than four days.
Maintain the same low temperatures in your refrigerator (40 degrees Fahrenheit or lower) and freezer (0 degrees or lower) with a thermometer.
Don’t eat hot dogs and deli meats until they’re steaming hot.
Avoid eating risky foods by monitoring websites like Foodsafety.gov.
Take a multi-species probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic or EndoMune Advanced Junior for kids can help prevent infections caused by contaminated foods by boosting your intestinal immunity.

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Avoid the Norovirus on your Cruise

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

You’ve spent a lot of time and effort saving up for that once-in-a lifetime vacation: a leisurely cruise taking you and your loved ones across the ocean to some exotic locale.

Then, you get “that” call from one of your fellow travelers warning you about the Royal Caribbean Explorer of the Seas ship disaster last winter during which some 650 passengers and crew members were sickened by a gastrointestinal illness.

As you dig deeper on the Internet, you learn that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identified 53 separate outbreaks of gastrointestinal illness between 2010-13 and start to wonder if the CNN headline “Are cruise ships floating petri dishes?” isn’t true.

The likely target of this massive illness: norovirus, an infection that causes the sudden onset of severe diarrhea, abdominal pain and vomiting, and a leading cause of acute gastroenteritis, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Typically, symptoms can last up to three days and most people recover on their own. But, in some instances, the norovirus may hit older adults, infants and those with underlying diseases harder, necessitating medical attention.

(Cruise ships aren’t the only places where the norovirus infections can spread. Schools, hospitals and nursing homes can be breeding grounds, too.)

A worldwide problem

A recent report in The Lancet Infectious Diseases spelled out the problems with the norovirus on a worldwide scale, featuring data from 48 countries on some 187,000 cases reported from 1990-2014.

You may be very surprised to learn the frequency of norovirus was slightly more common in developed countries (20 percent) than in undeveloped nations (14-19 percent).

“Norovirus spreads from person to person and through contaminated food and water and contact with contaminated surfaces,” said Dr. Benjamin Lopman, the lead author of this study who works in the Division of Viral Diseases at the CDC in Atlanta.

“The virus is contagious that as few as 18 viral particles may be enough to infect a healthy person, while more than a billion viruses can be found in a single gram of an infected person’s stool.

“Our findings show that norovirus infection contributes substantially to the global burden of acute gastroenteritis, causing both severe and mild cases and across all age groups,” Dr. Lopman concluded.

Unfortunately, the study authors believe their conclusions justify the development of a norovirus vaccine. However, there’s really no need for one more vaccine, as long as you follow the six ways to avoid traveler’s diarrhea outlined in a recent blog post.

Research has concluded taking a probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic or EndoMune Advanced Junior for kids before a long-distance vacation can boost your family’s immunities naturally and help them avoid norovirus infections altogether.

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How can white bread be healthy? It’s all about your gut!

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

In a recent blog post, we discussed how the human body can experience measurable health benefits by eating dark chocolate that interacts with Bifidobacterium in the gut to produce anti-inflammatory compounds.

The trick about deriving nutritional benefits from dark chocolate hinges on eating bitter-tasting brands that are minimally processed.

A recent study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry demonstrates just how versatile the healthy gut can be by taking advantage of the most popular processed food in the Western diet: white bread.

The white bread scoop

Because our diet has a direct impact on gut health, Spanish researchers from the University of Oviedo compared the intake of fibers and polyphenols (commonly found in fruits, vegetables, teas and spices) consumed in a normal diet in fecal samples taken from 38 healthy adults.

Many previous studies linking the gut microbiota to diets have focused on single foods full of soluble fibers that work as prebiotics (defined as nondigestible food ingredients that benefit human health by stimulating the growth of one or several bacterial species in the gut including Lactobacilli and Bifidobacteria).

In some of those studies, pectin alone, a gelatinous polysaccharide present in ripe fruits, usually evades digestion to reach the colon where it stimulates the growth of various gut bacteria.

However, pectin was also associated with a drop of certain fecal bacteria (C. leptum and B. coccoides) in this study, leading researchers to believe that it interacts with other chemicals in oranges to create this effect.

The most interesting finding: Eating plain white bread, made with refined grains, was responsible for a spike in Lactobacillus, one of the strains of bacteria contained in EndoMune Advanced Probiotic.

Until this study, prebiotic spikes in gut bacteria were mostly observed from eating whole-grain cereals due to the fiber content.

Don’t do it!

Before you consider adding white bread to your diet, there are plenty of healthy reasons to avoid it.

The most recent study on the consumption of white bread—scientists tracking the health of some 9,200 Spanish college grads during a five-year period—found patients who ate only white bread and two or more portions each day were 40 percent more likely to become overweight or obese compared to those who ate just one portion a week.

Conversely, no significant risk was found by eating only whole-grain bread with more fiber and various kinds of carbohydrates.

These results go hand-in-hand with dietary recommendations posted by the Mayo Clinic to prevent heart disease.

Yes, white bread is better than sweets, but it has a high glycemic value, so eating a lot of it can add to your risks of obesity and diabetes, said UK nutritionist Dr. Carrie Ruxton to BakeryandSnacks.com.

For your health’s sake, the best choice to promote good gut health is taking a multi-strain probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic and EndoMune Advanced Junior that contain no dairy products, preservatives and artificial colorings and are GMO- and gluten-free.

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Is kombucha tea really the “Champagne of Life” or an imposter?

Diet, Digestive Health / By @drHoberman

A diet rich in colorful fruits and vegetables and protein sources that aren’t red meat, along with cutting back on your daily caloric intake, can do wonders for your overall health, waistline and, particularly, your gut health (promoting the presence of beneficial bacteria, including Lactobacillus).

So, you may be thinking eating probiotic-rich foods in addition to taking a good probiotic is a good thing for your health. However, the jury is very much on the fence about the true benefits of eating probiotic-rich foods.

These mixed messages haven’t slowed down the meteoric popularity of kombucha tea—affectionately called the Champagne of Life, Fungus Japonicus and Mushroom Infusion—on grocery and book store shelves as a complete cure-all nor has it changed the minds of foodies about its perceived value as an energy booster or “fountain of youth.”

Looking for the cultures

Tart and bubbly, kombucha tea is made when brewed black tea is steeped with sugar, then fermented with cultures of bacteria and yeasts in a glass container. After at least a week’s time, billions of microorganisms ferment, soon forming a kombucha mushroom or SCOBY (symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast) on top of the tea.

The bacteria cultures contained in kombucha tea can vary greatly, from Saccharomycodes ludwigii to Candida stellate and Pichia fermentans. (Depending on how and where kombucha tea is made, it may also contain molds and fungi.

Despite the questions, people are buying millions of bottles of kombucha tea from companies like GT’s, Tonica and Celestial Seasonings at $4 per bottle. Last month, a new book by Steve Lee, the Portland-based entrepreneur behind Kombucha Wonder Drink, entitled Kombucha Revolution: 75 Recipes for Homemade Brews, Elixirs and Mixers, shows people how to incorporate the popular drink into daily diets.

The reality versus the hype

Unfortunately, the perceptions don’t match the debatable health benefits of kombucha tea. Surprisingly, the verdict from most conventional health sources (WebMD, Mayo Clinic, American Cancer Society) matches some of the same concerns voiced by alternative health expert Dr. Andrew Weil.

For one, it’s tough for consumers to make kombucha tea in germ-free home environments and at room temperatures for as long as 12 days where it can become contaminated with harmful bacteria. In an op-ed, Dr. Weil expressed grave concerns about the contamination of home-brewed kombucha teas, as some have contained aspergillus, a toxin-producing fungus.

The high amount of alcohol in home-brewed kombucha teas is another concern, according to Dr. Melissa Wdowik of Colorado State University. In fact, the Whole Foods grocery chain pulled all brands of kombucha teas four years ago due to fluctuations in alcoholic content above the legal 0.5 percent limit, until those amounts dropped.

Also, the “real” health benefits of kombucha teas from the scientific realm are almost non-existent. Although some research has been done with animals, no clinical studies related to kombucha tea have been conducted on humans.

Finally, never assume you’re getting the beneficial strains good bacteria you’d normally receive from taking a probiotic like EndoMune Advanced Probiotic in kombucha tea.

Taking a daily probiotic made from multiple strains of beneficial bacteria is far more effective in treating a wide range of problems, from irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) to traveler’s diarrhea, than drinking kombucha tea with no measurable benefits.

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