Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Kombucha

Episode Date: May 28, 2016

If you, like us, have been seeing kombucha everywhere, you've probably heard about it's many, many health benefits. Like, SO MANY health benefits. You know what ... you've listened to Sawbones for a while, right? You know where this is going. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books! One, two, one, two, three, four! We came across a pharmacy with a toy and that's lost it out. We were shot through the broken glass and had ourselves a look around.

Some medicines, some medicines that escalate my cop for the mouth. Wow! Hello and we're ready to welcome to Salona to rental tour of this guy to medicine. I am your co-host Justin McAroy and I'm Sydney McAroy Boy since you're we had a scary moment today anyway Yeah, we did our daughter Charlie has been getting She's she's more and more mobile. I mean, that's a good thing. Look. I'm not complaining. I don't want her to get less mobile Yeah, like I'm glad she's more mobile. I mean, that's a good thing. Like, I'm not complaining. I don't want her to get less mobile. Yeah. Like, I'm glad she's more mobile. But a lot comes with that, like, a lot of things that weren't treacherous before. All the sudden are things, I mean, like, I don't, is there a way to really child proof a house? You can't. You just got to hope

for the best. If you just remove everything from it and pad the walls. Yeah, right. She'd still find some way to hurt herself, but like, you can't have a kitchen table, you can't have chairs next to the table. Because she, we left the room for like 30 seconds, she climbed right up there and we came back in the room and there she is sitting at the tea set and she's sitting cross leg.

Cross leg. Just in the middle of the table. I don't know how she got up there that fast. I'm holding sugar cubes, just like pounding them. We have a T set set up there, which is again, short-sighted of us, we really need to move past that. But in the Justin-like sugar cubes, in the little T bowl, like little sugar bowl.

I think it's cute. It is adorable. He even has a little like T tray, like for little cakes. And like cupcakes, you go with it. That's not Jury, that's not Jermaine. It's all lovely. But anyway, it's all set up and Charlie likes,

she knows there's sugar cubes up there. And so if there she is sitting there just eating sugar cubes. It was terrifying. Yeah, it's terrifying. Sitting on the table. That kid loves tea, huh? She does.

She loves tea, she's obsessed with it. Yeah, Charlie's obsessed with tea, she'll have tea parties. A lot of it just has to do with like the ability to eat sugar, like eat straight sugar. It's a nice, a nice perk. And tea parties. And dump.

Oh yeah, you get to dump things. She loves to dump. Yeah, she loves tea. She loves tea. But tea's really hot, you know, like it's a really trendy. Tea is hot or it can be cold to me It's pretty much any way you want to serve tea is Is okay by me. This is our tea cast. Tea cast. Welcome to the tea spot

You know one popular tea Justin that we hear a lot again. Welcome to the tea party I'm your buddy Justin Earl Gray, McElroy. No, not the tea party Not that tea party, but it's like, I'm at the good one. The dope one we all still feel okay about. Like, you just mean like a teak party. Like, when you sit down with your friends and have a cup of tea, like that kind of like that tea party. Bosses, dope party. It's like that dope one that we all feel good about. No, the boss one, or it's like, freedom, know, like, from one that they were into before, yeah, T's hot, T's popular right now.

Right, you know, one T that's really popular. What's that? Kombucha. I've heard that name, but I don't know pretty much anything about it. You've had it, do you remember having it? No. No, we tried it once.

There's only one time that I have remember having Kombucha. So there you go. So there's my disclaimer, like I'm clearly not a fan, I'm not saying I'm against it, but don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it.

I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it.

I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can do it. I don't want to say like hipster bars, but hipster

bars. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so do you know much about kombucha? Again, I think I feel like I've been pretty upfront about how much I know about kombucha. So nothing. Yeah.

Okay. The reason I want to talk about it is because yes, it's a T, but it is touted as having all kinds of health benefits. Oh, nice. Wow, that's great. That's cool because it's good to drink and also is really good for me. Well, hold on. Imagine my excitement.

Hold on. So I think that it's... We'll get a kombucha here. We'll get it. Garçon. Garçon. Another kombucha, please. We don't have anybody who brings us kombucha in our house.

No, that would be nice though. Yeah, but a lot of people also wanted us to talk about this topic. Thank you, Anthony, John, Bridgett, and Danae. And I think that it has also been suggested multiple times on Twitter and on Facebook, too. But again, if you want me to say your name when you suggest a topic, you've got to send it to me in an email. Because it's searchable. So I'll get that heat over.

So I'm going to actually fund out of work. So thank you guys for suggesting this topic. So kombucha is a fermented tea. Now what is that, the, well, I know what fermented means, but. You know what fermented means? You know what tea is? You can probably piece this one together.

It's an alcoholic tea. Yes, very slightly alcoholic. It has a very low but present alcohol content. It's like 0.5 to 1% alcohol. Like, can you still buy it at the CVS? It is regulated as an alcoholic beverage. Okay. Yeah.

That's actually one of the things we'll get into. It is alcoholic barely though. I mean, it is. But if you worked at it. If you worked at it, you'd have to drink a lot of kombucha, I think, to get a buzz. So, the way that you make it is you take something that's, you need to understand this. It's something that's called a scoby.

Okay. SCOBY. It is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast. Okay. Got it. Scoby with you. So bacteria and yeast living together. Mass hysteria. Helping each other out.

Symbiosis. So what this looks like, this scoby, because you need to visualize this, like what are you going to do with it? You're going to take a scoby and you're going to put it in some tea. Okay. A scoby looks like a lot of people describe it as a pancake. It's like this little rubbery beige disc. Okay. Okay, and it's got living things in it, right? bacteria and yeast. Okay. And you're gonna take that and you're gonna put that into green tea or black tea or whatever kind of tea you want. Like I am at home or is this happening like in a facility, Broadway? Both. Wow.

There are, there's commercial kombucha available, but there are lots of people who home brew kombucha. That is a popular thing to do. So you would, you would take your scoby, you would put it in tea and you also wanna add some sugar for the E.C. Exactly, exactly. And you get something that is bubbly,

fizzy, slightly alcoholic, and again, highly priced for having a lot of medicinal value. It's sort of that, that rubbery disc, the scoby. Think about it. Remember we talked about the mother in the vinegar episode, the vinegar mother? It's very similar idea. Okay.

Except it's in this little, little rubbery disc. You can like share, give over your friends. Perfect, that makes sense. That's more like the like a sourdough starter. Okay, got it. So it's not clear. Now when we talk about like where did this originate? Who first got the bright idea to start fermenting tea?

This gets really dicey. You hear this same story repeated over and over again if you search this on the internet, but I'm not really sure that this is true. Because there are just as many people who refute this as the origin of kombucha as claimed that absolutely it is. All right. So mysterious origins. So here it is folks.

Maybe some nonsense. So it could be that kombucha dates back as far as 221 BCE during the Chinese dynasty, the keen dynasty, and it's their references to something called the tea of immortality. And the thought is that what they're talking about is some sort of fermented beverage that has to do with tea and that this is where these are the roots of this. And certainly if you're looking at one of the sites that kind of tout kombucha for its health benefits and for all of its almost almost magical qualities, like you get, you know, of course anything like this, you'll have some people who are real zealots for it. So they're going to say that this is where this came from, that this is like an ancient Chinese secret.

Ancient Chinese secret, eh? Exactly. They have fermented tea. And from that tea of immortality, you get, I have to mention so many other crazy names for kombucha. The fact? The kombucha isn't crazy enough. The fact that we don't have anyone around who can tell us if that's the, for kombucha. As if kombucha isn't crazy enough. The fact that we don't have anyone around who can tell us

if kombucha was actually started as the tea of immortality speaks to the fact that that may be a slightly specious title for the tea itself. Yeah, you'd think if it were somebody from 221 BCE and they found the tea of immortality, I could have interviewed them for our podcast. Yeah, we could have had a guess. So some other things that it has been known, other names that it's been known by maybe

since then, I don't know, maybe since more recently, sea treasure, stomach treasure, sea mushroom, miracle fungus, all of this related to the fact that this is like a you know a fermented fungus mushroomy tea beverage, okay, you know magical fungus I I like some of these Japanese sponge Mongolian wine and Indian wine Volga spring To betten mushroom. This sounds very like yeah, very plugged into this a lot of ancient wisdom in this kombucha.

There is, there is. There's some other names that we see it moved. It actually, as I'll talk about, we came really popular in Russia and we get these names Tikvas. Tikvas? Yeah. There is another legend that the name

may have come from Japan. So this is a competing theory where there was a physician named Kambu. Okay. He could see where this is headed. And they were like, did you make this tea and he's like, cha? That's good. Oh, like that. So there was a physician named Kambu who treated the emperor for who was having some digestive problems. And he treated him with some sort of tea, and Cha is the Chinese word for tea.

So... Probably... Kombucha. The word cha, right? Probably, yeah. Oh, they say we're here. I'm not. Probably.

So kombucha. Kombucha. Kombucha. Kombucha. They got it. His tea. And that's where it comes from. But there are also references to the word kombucha. Kombucha. There you go. His tea. And that's where it comes from. But there are also references to

the word kombucha not really coming from a physician's name and chaw, but coming from different words that mean mushroom tea and fungus tea and different references like that. But chaw definitely is a word for tea. So we know that's part of it. There's also this legend that it was, it came from the samurai warriors who knew that there was this special tea beverage that made you really strong and gave you a lot of energy. And so they carried it into battle with them. There's been rumors that maybe it was popular among Japanese gaysas who would use it to keep their complexion. Great. use it to keep their complexion, great. Put it on their faces and drink it to maintain their figure. And that also it was thought to turn gray hair back to its original color.

Wow, man, I'm getting so excited about kombucha right now. I tell ya. It's also said that it was believed to be a cure for food poisoning in ancient Japan. What can't this stuff do? They're may, there are also records that indicate Genghis Khan may have carried

kombucha with him at all times. That's unclear. I also read in that same article that he invented barbecue. Justin, I have a question for you. Did Genghis Khan invent barbecue? Did Genghis Khan invent barbecue? Well, Sydney.

This has nothing to do with kombucha or tea or medicine or anything we talk about. I'm just kind of curious. It's timeless again for hot news segment on Top Ends, just and Googled it. So, I'm going to tell you a little bit more. I'll move forward. I'll tell you a little bit more about kombucha while you tell me if Gingus con invented barbecue. Okay. So, as I kind of alluded to, the this important turning point for kombucha

is where we see it show up in the late 1800s in Russia. Now, there are many people who would argue this is where it comes from, that all this other like legend about coming from China and from Japan, that all of that isn't really true, that it was really a product of Russia in the late 1800s. And it became very popular there and in Germany and places where they were already familiar with fermented foods, you know, like, things like sourcrap, for instance,

like you see people who are already kind of like have a palette for that are adopting this fermented tea beverage. So let's talk about Ginghis Khan super quick. What you're actually sort of like talking about is quote unquote Mongolian barbecue, which is neither Mongolian nor barbecue. It's served on the big It's served on the big round iron grittles, you know, yeah, yeah, so It's really only kind of loosely related to barbecue the first Mongolian barbecue restaurant was called gingas con mongolian BBQ And it was located in downtown Taipei, Taiwan. So that's the That's the how the whole thing came together. And now you know. And now you know, Genghis, my boy Genghis Khan did not have anything to do with Mongolian barbecue. And perhaps nothing to do with kombucha as well.

Maybe not. You know, I've heard a lot of things about kombucha. I can't imagine any of most of them are true. But we definitely know that it became very popular in Russia at this point in time. And it probably would have grown in popularity then, except for World War II, actually kind of put a stop to it, largely due to the, the unavailability of things like sugar and tea, right? Right. So after World War II, we start to see a revival as people are able to access these things again easily in Italy and Germany. And then there was a lot of research done by Soviet researchers who were trying to figure out why there was this specific region

of perm on the Karma River that had been contaminated with a lot of things like lead and mercury and asbestos. But for some reason, the people who lived in this particular region were not getting cancer from these different environmental toxins, like a lot of other people in that area were. And so, well, they interviewed all these people and somehow arrived at the conclusion that it was because they drank so much kombucha that they were not getting cancer. And so from here, we start to see this theory emerge

that maybe kombucha is a secret cure for cancer. Okay. So this is starting, there are whispers of this. It's kind of a folk remedy. You see a lot of people who were drinking it, although not formally proposing this like in the medical literature, until we start to see like

several different doctors one in particular a German doctor named Rudolph Schleiner who used kombucha as well as probiotics in general meaning like good bacteria to treat cancer as well as basically anything but mainly cancer and he would go on to write a book about this that a lot of people still cite today as kind of like one of the most important fake one of the most important kombucha works. What I'm listing some of my fakeest dumbest books I know about the number one is the guy who says kombucha deep curse cancer. First so let me let me kind of walk you through his process just so you kind of know, like,

let's say that you're... That's right, you're going to go see... Yeah, for sure. You're going to go see the good doctor Rudolph, and you're going to ask him to cure your cancer with kombucha. The first thing he's going to do is a blood stain that he invented. There was a specific kind of staining process. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but he was the one who created it,

and he would look at your blood, and he could tell you, he thought he had identified the agent that caused cancer, that there was something that he saw in the blood that was the cause of cancer, and he could divide you into four stages, basically. And there were pre-cancer stages, and then cancer stages, four of them all together,

and he could look at that agent in your blood and tell you where you were on the cancer spectrum. Yeah, how convenient. Um, this thing he came up with. He could then to add to the stain for more information, sort of another diagnostic study, he would look at your irises. This is called iridology, people who study irises of your eye. Is it real?

No, to look for different markers. I mean, certainly, yes, it is important to look at someone's irises, someone's irises if you're going to examine them and doing an appropriate eye exam, but no, that I'm talking about is not. But he could tell you about your general health and well-being by seeing different pigments in your eyes and then thought he could judge whether

or not he was successful in curing you as to whether or not they went away after he gave you his treat. Combustity. Yes. So, and this also, by the way, applied to people who were pre-cancer. Sure, right. So, if you came to him and he couldn't find evidence that you had cancer, but he thought maybe you were pre-cancer.

Slightly nihilistic way of seeing people, but sure. Then he also had a treatment for you. It's the same treatment. There's a little sneak peak. It's the same treatment. It just depends on how much of it you're supposed to drink. So he had a homemade kombucha preparation as well as I see him refer to it again and again as coli or coli.

I don't know how they're pronouncing it. Coli would be appropriate, coli compounds, which are just E coli, like the bacteria. Like semi coli. Semi coli, right? Right, so semi coli and some kombucha. If you are pre-cancer, you drink a quarter liter of this a day, if you are current cancer,

you would drink a whole liter of this a day if you are current cancer, you would drink a whole liter of this a day. Other things that he would advise in addition to drinking your coli compounds and kombucha is don't worry, feel shock or fear because these emotions make cancer worse. That's funny because I'm treating my cancer with tea. So I do feel a considerable amount of fear. That's so funny that I'm not supposed to feel that. It seems counterintuitive. Yeah, this seems like a worry-inducing situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it might be a little shock when I heard that was the treatment. But in four to six months, your cancer will be gone. Oh, dunk. Well, man, I feel bad for talking a bunch of yay about this guy now. And he knew for sure that it was gone because he repeated the blood stain that he created

and left in your eye recess again. Okay, yeah. And he could tell that it was gone at this point. Okay. Great. Man, that's convenient. So publishing these findings and then the book that would follow this was part of this is only just there are many, many stories like this, but there were there were a lot of doctors who popularized it at this point in time. And more and more followed this literature and it became a cure all of sorts. Hmm, I wonder if we know about cure all this from this, just said, cure all this, cure nothing. Except first, in the case of kombucha,

this episode has been brought to you by kombucha. No, it hasn't. It hasn't. No. That would be uncomfortable, I think. No, but if you wanna know who this episode is is brought to you by Justin, why don't you follow me to the Billing Department? Let's go.

The medicines, the medicines that I've killed in my car before the mouth. Sid, you were right in the middle of telling me about how refreshing and cancer-curing kombucha is. Well, I've got like empty kombucha glasses lined up next to me. I've been pounding it through the whole show. Pretty sure I'm okay on the cancer front forever with as much kombucha as I've been drinking, but I just wanna know exactly how much I need a drink to keep from ever getting cancer.

Okay, I'm gonna get into some of the wise people think this is true and whether or not it is, you probably already know where this is going. I don't think it is going to be shocked. But before I do, let me just clarify, this was not at this point in time, you know, as we're moving into the later 1900s, we're not thinking of kombucha just as a cancer cure. Okay. No, it is being claimed to treat basically anything. A panacea, I've used the term.

Exactly, fatigue, hypertension, allergic allergies, it's a big claim. Bad but if you have a bad but it can fix it. Well, yeah, digestive issues, hemorrhoids, it's claimed for hemorrhoids, for headaches, for atherosclerosis, such as heart disease, tilarure cholesterol, metabolic disorders, arthritis, some things that like, candidal infections, and when I read that, I'm not even sure if they necessarily mean like, real candidal infections.

What could that be? Well, there's also this concept of people being invaded with Candida. What? With yeast. With Candida? Yeah, the people have these. I don't want to get into that.

What are you talking about? Anyway. The country? No, Candida yeast. What? Candida. Okay, you need to bump the brakes. It's yeast.

Stop saying Cand Canada at me. Like a duff. Canada. Okay. See, check the raffi-tune. It's C-A-N-A-D-A. No, C-A-N-D-I-D-A. Canada.

Okay. I don't know why you keep saying Canada at me. Like I'm some sort of idiot child, okay? I know what Canada is. Not the country, not all Canada. Why is Canada invading? Like Canada dole. That's the part of the worst Michael Moore movie, Canadian Okay, I know what Canada is not the country not oh Vading like that's the problem the worst Michael Moore movie Canadian bacon like I saw it it was not very good And now you're just shouting Canada at me Canada. It's yeast. It's a word It's a country. It's not Canada

Canada I quit anyway Nada, Candida. I quit. Anyway, in addition to that, it became a popular folk treatment. If we can use that word for it for HIV charming colloquialism. Folk cure. For HIV, when we think about like the 80s, when we began to start to understand what was happening with HIV,

there were a lot of people who were told or led to believe that kombucha would help them cure their HIV. And of course, cancer already mentioned. And this is not just to drink. Like it was also advised that you wash your hair with kombucha that you have any kind of wounds on your skin. You just kind of rub kombucha all in it. Inema, inema, inema. Sure, kombucha,ucha animals. Yeah, because there's good there's good stuff in there

You need in your gut, so why not deliver it direct direct to send or take the honor Ant Expressway and also that it will reverse aging and make you live longer. I am so excited about kombucha Hey, you know what? Listen at home. I know this is normally the part of the show where you'd continue listening for the rest of it. But why don't you just, why don't you just get off here? What do you think? We've heard a lot of great things.

We can live our lives pounding Compucha together. We can just get off right here. You see some claims throughout the 1900s, like there was a doctor, Melinda in the 20s, who was talking about angina, which is like heart pain, pain that comes from the heart, especially when it's not getting appropriate blood flow in oxygen.

In the case of angina, especially when there is a coating of the tonsils, can't make those work, but the drink should not merely be used for gargling, but for drinking and that for the destruction of bacteria. Such gargling in angina brings fast recovery. I just love the idea of gargling something to relieve your angina. That's not what we recommend. We still recommend the ER for that. Sure.

When your heart hurts. One of the oldest brands commercially available, I think it was actually the first commercially available in the US. I think so. Is GT Kombucha? Very widely known. And it's based on a story.

And we see this. We've talked about this before with a lot of like health foods and supplements and things like that, that they're based on a story of someone who was cured miraculously, buy it. And the story behind GT Kombucha is that his mother had an aggressive breast cancer that never spread and the doctors credited it to. Kombucha. Drinking Kombucha.

They already drank Kombucha before that. So why do people think it has all these health benefits? So if you start reading like the rationale, like why it's a fermented tea, like we know what we know what fermentation is, we know what tea is, right? Nobody's claiming that all fermented beverages cure everything or that all teas cure everything. So why when you put them together as this magic happening, I don't know. There are several reasons people will cite one, It has a lot of acids in it.

This is a very strange reasoning to me, but I've seen this. It has a lot of organic acids, lactic acid, acetic acid, malac acid, gluteuronic acid. They say that these acids do lots of things in your body. They kill bacteria. They detoxify you. That mystical thing that acids do. That many health foods do. They detoxify.

They lubricate your joints, they kill viruses, they give you energy. They also say that they help you regulate your blood pH. Just on a side note, no, they don't. No foods that you, no, that's not. You know what does, your lungs and your kidneys regulate your blood pH. Give it up very long senior kidneys.

Yeah, and it's hard work and it's very complex to understand and we spend a lot of time in medical school learning about it. Trust me. Kombucha is not regulating your blood pH for you. And lactic acid is something that we measure as a sign of sepsis, so not sure why. So these acids are supposed to be good for you also. Your muscles make them though also when you exercise, that's what gives you the burn.

Well, but... If you think about it. I mean, that's not like a good, I mean, like, yes, exercise is good for you, but it's not so that you can produce extra lactic acids to regulate your blood pH. Okay, I got it. No. Also, it has probiotics. It's got good bacteria.

We all know that that's a thing. And that's true. Good, We need more good bacteria in our gut. Antibiotics wipe that out. It's got lots of B vitamins. It has. I'll say I always see this a lot of enzymes. Guys, like just enzymes, that doesn't mean anything. Like we have enzymes. You have to have enzymes. If you're enzyme, if you didn't have enzymes, we wouldn't be listening to this podcast because you'd be dead.

Okay, well, so don't worry about that. Definitely want some more of those and I think all the kombucha is going to get it for me. No, no, they're just there. They're fine. Don't worry about your enzymes. Please don't worry about your enzymes. A lot of to-do has been made about the possible presence of the specific acid, glucuronic acid or glucoric acid.

One of these two that might or might not be in kombucha, which is supposed to clean out your liver and clean bad stuff out of your body. I've read that it acidifies your body and that's why it works. I also read that it alkalinizes your body and that's why it works, you know, the opposite. You're right.

Right, so it does one of those two things and that's why it works, you know, the opposite. You're right. Right, so it does one of those two things, and that's why it works. On a side note, because as I've mentioned, it is alcoholic, you're not allowed to take it to school. Okay. I wasn't. Or at a report of some poor kid in California who brought a bottle of kombucha to school

and got in trouble because alcohol. You know, it's alcohol. Right. Got alcohol in it. You can't take alcohol. I mean, this is, uh, I struggle with this because I know it's bad, but like it's, it's not that expensive. I wouldn't imagine it's not really hurting anybody, right? Well, not necessarily. So in that, in that question, it may have hurt people. Okay.

Uh, in 1995, the CDC linked at least one and maybe two deaths to kombucha. Now a large part of this is, it's more of a factor of the home brewing than it is kombucha the beverage itself. Just like anything that you are going to ferment and make at home, if you're not using proper sterilization techniques, you can let bad bacteria get in there and people can get really sick. You can have byproducts that are created in the fermentation process. We know this from being beer home brewers. You can make people really sick if you're not careful. Or you can make a really low gravity beer that took like six weeks to make and it's like

pointless to drink because it doesn't taste that good. You could do that too. That might happen to you. Yeah, it's a horrible thing. I would wish that on my worst. And you can like hate drink all 30 bottles of it, even though you have no effect other than having to use the bathroom pretty bad, that could happen. Either way, so after these two possible, and again, that was not, this was never completely certain, but after these two possible deaths were linked to kombucha consumption in 1995, the CDC basically came down on the side of saying, look, just don't drink it, or at least at the very least, if you're going to drink it, don't be drinking it for health benefits.

If you just like it, kind of like you do, you would drink alcohol. If you like alcohol and you want to drink it, that's fine, but don't pretend like you're drinking it to cure your cancer because it doesn't do that. And that is actually so far been the weight of the evidence has come down on that side that all of these health claims probably cannot be borne out by any sort of studies. And again, this was, you know, further hampered by the fact that in 2010, it was unpasturized kombucha was regulated by the FDA's alcohol.

Ah, Shucks. So, man, science has always come around to spoil the fun. I read a lot of studies on kombucha because there are people doing them. They're all very small. There's small people. No, very small studies. A full oomph is studying kombucha because there are people doing them. They're all very small. They're extremely, no, very small studies. A full oombas are studying to make you as we speak. Because people will tell you about anything like this, anything like a supplement or something

herbal or natural. There's not a lot of money in it. So you're not going to get the big giant double-blind studies that you get for brand name pharmaceuticals that you see on TV. And that's a fair criticism. yes, that's true. You're not going to. But even in the small studies that I saw, there are just as many that said they didn't see an effect on whatever they were studying, high blood pressure, cholesterol, like that whole detoxifying thing,

looking to see if they have an antioxidant property. There were many that said they did, and then there were many that said they didn't. So I would say inconclusive, not enough data to say for sure. Yes, there's probiotics in there. That's true. So, you know, just like we tell people to eat yogurt, drink kombucha, yeah, I think that's fine.

And I don't think that as far as are they, is it going to kill you? I mean, probably not. I think it's the same risk as anything that's home brewed. You know, you can't regulate the equipment. So who knows? You know, it's a kind of a buyer beware thing at that point. Some of one of the stranger studies I did see was that they had a bunch of rats. This is really, and I know you don't like rats just in, but this is, this is rough even for rats. And they cut the rats. And then like half of the rats, they then poured kombucha on.

And the other half they didn't. And they said that the rats that they poured kombucha on, the cuts they put on them healed faster than the rats that they did absolutely nothing for. Who cares, rats are the pets. I still would not advocate pouring kombucha on a on a kombucha rat. Especially if it's homemade,

because you don't know what other bacteria might be. And I just don't think, just don't do that. And also this. So I found this quote from a doctor who is a practitioner of Oriental Medicine and Ayurvedic practitioner is what his degree that he claimed. And a quote was of all the food trends out there, I am most skeptical of kombucha. My personal opinion is that it have little use,

if not contraindicated. And then he goes into some different specifics of Ayurvedic medicine. But as a yeast product, I would not suggest a daily lifestyle use of kombucha. All right. So if we have people who are already accepting of kind of alternative medicine being highly critical of it, here's what I would say.

If you like kombucha and you know the kombucha you're drinking is safe and properly produced, you drink that kombucha. You go for it. I got no problem with it. I drank some. It was pretty tasty. And some people think it's a healthy alternative to soda because it gives you that Fizz that soda gives you without all the other stuff and that's all well and good. That's fine

But again, like we always say if you are sick Please don't drink kombucha. I mean you can but drink it on the way to the doctor Folks, that's gonna do it for us. We hope that you Learned something today. And we're sorry, this shows a little bit late. You know, life, life. But we're here now. That's the important thing.

We're here with you. We'll always be here for you. We just may be late. That's, yeah, that's us. Thanks to the taxpayers for Les Usosong Medicines and the International World Program. Thanks to the maximum fun network. Listen, we're gonna be announcing a live show coming up on Monday

or Tuesday next week, but it may be before I take a three-hour go on sale before our next episode goes up. So keep an eye on our Facebook group and our Twitter channels for that. So you won't miss out. Yeah. And thank you, by the way. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everybody who donated the Max Fun Drive. We just wanted to reiterate that. We really appreciate you. Yeah, thank you for making it possible for us to keep doing this and it's wonderful. We really enjoy it and you guys make it all the better. And also, if you have a second,

we always appreciate if you like our show and you like what we do and you want make it all the better. And also, if you have a second, we always appreciate if you like our show and you like what we do, and you want to spread the word, check out iTunes and review us there. One's like this show, like kombucha are really good because it's something people are talking about. So if you think somebody might dig it

or might be interested in it, or you don't want it. Or you want to make somebody really angry. You want to really take somebody off. Just please share this and review and put it on their face so cool. OK, that's going to do it for us folks until next Wednesday. Sure.

We're there about. We're there about. My name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Popping, popping, popping, rose. Music Alright! Yeah! Maximumfund.org Comedy and culture.

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