Would you like a cup of tea? With milk and sugar, you say? Why don’t you try it the way I like it instead? I brew the tea, add sugar and yeast, and leave it on my windowsill for a couple of weeks. Yeah, so that a big snotty fungus grows in it. No, I don’t change the water, I just leave the tea there to foster any bacteria that happens to be floating round in the air. If someone sneezes on it, the sneeze stays in it. If a fleck of meat juice falls in while I’m cooking, that stays in there to fester too. Then I drink it. It’s a kombucha, or “tea mushroom!” Yum!
Why on Earth would I drink a jar of foetid mushroom bacteria slime? For the myriad of unproven, anecdotal health claims, of course. Apparently kombucha cures AIDS, cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune disease. It also supposedly boosts libido, and will turn grey hair back to its original colour. A cure all, which means if you want to believe kombucha cures something that’s not on the list, you can add it on yourself and no one will question your authority. I think I’ll tell you that it cures polio, just for fun. And, of course, the name is Russian. So exciting.
Don’t worry, human guts are pretty strong. If you manage to choke the kombucha down, it is unlikely you will experience adverse effects. The American Cancer Society has said some nonsense about “occasional deaths” associated with drinking Kombucha, but what would they know. They also bang on about food poisoning, liver damage, kidney toxicity, and metabolic acidosis, but don’t think about it and it probably won’t happen.
So why, you ask, do doctors not prescribe kombucha as medicine for patients with erectile dysfunction and diabetes? Because they are evil people who don’t care about the health of anyone else, and happily watch their close friends and families die of curable diseases like cancer and AIDS. They spend seven years learning how to hide the real cures from regular people.
By the way, it doesn’t taste like tea anymore. It tastes like fermented goat wee mixed with rotten vinegar. Bottoms up!
Why are you leaving?