[sosilkj]

(Disclaimer upfront: I am not a doctor or medical professional.)

Kombucha often contains some alcohol. I'd suggest being cautious about alcohol consumption - frankly, eliminating it altogether from your diet would be my personal suggestion; there is evidence of increased risk of colon cancer from alcohol.

Just grabbing the first thing I found: "Moderate to heavy alcohol consumption is associated with 1.2- to 1.5-fold increased risks of cancers of the colon and rectum compared with no alcohol consumption". From here: https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/a...

They give several references there to back up that statement, those could be worth reading.

Best wishes for your recovery and health and longterm success.

Edit: wow, i'm getting downvoted? if i'm saying something inaccurate or inappropriate here, i'd be grateful for some specific feedback. thanks.

[prepend]

Kombucha has about 0.5% alcohol by volume [0] (a ripe banana has 0.4%) so it’s not really a reasonable risk per the studies you link to. I think this is a foolish interpretation and even as a non medical doctor it’s easy to look at the alcohol content and think critically.

Kombucha has 1/10 the alcohol of a beer. So you would need to drink 40 12oz kombuchas in an hour to be intoxicated (moderate alcohol use). That’s almost 4 gallons and really not practical a single time, much less daily like what contributes to colon cancer risk.

I suspect you’re being downvoted because your comment is low value, wrong, and doesn’t need to be seen. For specific feedback, I think you can think critically about whether the level of alcohol applies to the advice you give.

It’s the dose that makes toxicity. Working to eliminate completely things that don’t matter reflect a wrong understanding of nature.

[0] https://www.no1living.com/blogs/blog/is-kombucha-alcoholic

[echelon]

Alcohol is a high energy, reactive species. Both it and its downstream metabolic products cause a host of DNA degradation: cross-linking, etc. Accumulation of this class of damage causes aging, cancer, dysfunction, and other cellular disease states.

Every nutritive food we intake, including the gaseous and reactive molecular oxygen, is reactive and damaging. Some are worse than others, but we can control what we consume.

In time, our view of many of the things we do - breathing dirty air, consuming too much alcohol, maintaining an unhealthy gut microbiomes, etc., will inform new habits.

We don't know what the lower bound of safe alcohol consumption is. Modest consumption probably increases risks, but it may be negligible against the background noise of everything else we bump into. The effects will also sum with any other bad habits an individual may have. Population studies are messy, but we do know the biochemistry.

I only had an undergraduate biochem + general chemistry degree, so I'm not "credentialed" in this space. I continue to read the literature regularly, though, because it interests me deeply. I do worry about alcohol consumption's effects on my health, even though I continue to drink kombucha and have a cocktail every now and again. It still wears on me.

We're all killing ourselves slowly through eating, breathing, and metabolizing. You can worry about it, you can disregard it, you can make small changes, etc. We're all dying, though.

[prepend]

> We don't know what the lower bound of safe alcohol consumption is.

You’re right, but we have studies that show the levels that show harm. It’s possible that the alcohol in kombucha could harm us, but there’s no evidence. So it doesn’t affect our lives. The FDA doesn’t even consider it an alcoholic drink since it has less than 1.2%BAC. I don’t trust the government completely, but I think if there was any harm in the alcohol in kombucha (or bananas) we would know about it.

Again, you’d have to drink 4 gallons of it to get a buzz so even a baby’s liver can metabolize the alcohol in kombucha without causing concern for anyone.

[slothtrop]

Moderate consumption was previously defined as 1-2 drinks per day for men or 7 a week, which does not seem moderate at all. This guideline has recently been changed in some countries to 1-2 a week.

a 1.5 fold increase of risk is not necessarily significant if the baseline risk is low, but notwithstanding, I'm not convinced that actually moderate consumption of alcohol poses much of a risk.

[porphyra]

Isn't kombucha way less than "moderate to heavy alcohol consumption"? Besides, small amounts of alcohol form naturally from stuff fermenting in your gut. To be honest, I would be more concerned about my tooth enamel degrading from heavy kombucha consumption (as it is very acidic) rather than the alcohol content.

[sosilkj]

It seems like the question you're posing is: in the context of colon cancer risk, if one's alcohol consumption isn't enough to reach the category of "moderate", does that mean the increased risk is zero (or insignificant)? I don't know the answer to that. That's something that could perhaps be determined by reviewing the literature.

Edit: Not that anyone cares, but I guess I'll say a bit more: I don't know what brand of kombucha OP drinks, or how much of it, and how many grams of alcohol that sums up to, and what the current body of research says (or doesn't) regarding the precise amount of risk incurred or not from that amount of alcohol ... but the fact is, there's extensive research on the association between alcohol and cancer and I stand by the suggestions that someone dealing with recurrent colon cancer should be cautious about alcohol consumption, and that it could be worth reviewing existing research on the matter.

[prepend]

It’s not reasonable to conclude that because moderate alcohol causes an effect that less than that causes a diminished effect.

You need evidence, or at least some logical basis, to make a claim or believe such a thing.

You can review the literature to find something. Typically is a paper is publishing about moderate levels causing an effect they will cite or be cited by other studies showing effects from other levels.

There are many things in nature that are harmless at some level and become harmful at another level. And there’s no negative effect whatsoever from the appropriate level.