Kombucha tea, a popular drink known for its sweet and tangy taste, has been gaining fans not just for its flavor but also for its reported health benefits.
People say it can do everything from lowering blood pressure to preventing cancer and fighting off liver diseases.
The secret behind these benefits is thought to be the drink’s good bacteria and yeast, which might help our bodies work better, particularly in how we handle fats.
But up until now, there hasn’t been much solid proof, especially in humans, about how true all these claims are.
Enter Robert Dowen and his team from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. They decided to dive deeper into this topic and shared their discoveries in the journal PLOS Genetics.
Instead of testing on humans right away, they started with a tiny worm known as C. elegans, a common choice for scientific experiments because what happens in these worms can often give clues about what might happen in humans.
The researchers gave these worms kombucha tea to see what would happen, especially focusing on how the tea’s microbes—its tiny living organisms like yeast and bacteria—would affect the worms’ metabolism, which includes all the chemical processes that occur in our bodies, like breaking down food for energy and building up or breaking down body fats.
What they found was pretty exciting. The kombucha microbes made themselves at home in the worms’ guts and started changing how the worms handled fats. These changes looked a lot like what happens when an organism fasts, even though the worms were not fasting.
Specifically, the worms started breaking down fats more aggressively and slowed down the process of making new fat molecules, known as triglycerides. This led to a noticeable decrease in the worms’ fat storage.
These findings are a step forward in understanding how the good bacteria and yeast in kombucha might be influencing metabolism in ways that mirror the benefits of fasting.
Fasting has been linked to various health benefits, including improved metabolism and reduced fat storage, so finding a dietary element that can mimic these effects is exciting.
Of course, the big question is whether humans drinking kombucha can expect the same kind of benefits. The researchers are careful to say that more studies are needed to confirm that.
However, their work does line up with what many kombucha drinkers have claimed about the beverage’s health benefits. It also opens up the possibility that kombucha could one day play a role in health care, perhaps as a complementary approach to improve metabolic health.
The team was especially surprised by how the kombucha diet led to a situation that looked a lot like fasting in the worms, with less fat buildup and lower fat molecule levels, despite having enough nutrients.
This suggests that the kombucha microbes can trigger a fasting-like state, offering a fascinating glimpse into how diet influences our health and well-being through the tiny world of microbes.
If you care about weight management, please read studies about diets that could boost your gut health and weight loss, and 10 small changes you can make today to prevent weight gain.
For more information about obesity, please see recent studies about low-carb keto diet could manage obesity effectively and results showing popular weight loss diet linked to heart disease and cancer.
The research findings can be found in PLoS Genetics.
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