[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.