Nathan Hague

Kombucha Benefits For Women – 2023 Update

Before we start, know this article is a 10 minute read on all the kombucha benefits for women that I could find – updated for 2023.

This isn’t going to be super light and fluffy puff piece on Kombucha. I wanted to cut through all the marketing hype on kombucha so you could make a WAY more informed opinion on whether or not there are kombucha benefits for women like yourself. I’ve got lots of scientific references to back up what I talk about in this article, rather than a marketing department coming up with “kombucha facts”. Heh.

As of the time of writing this in June 2022, it seems that kombucha is everywhere in Thailand now. You can buy your favourite brand in any convenience or grocery store – as well as in gyms, cafes and restaurants. Even high end hotels such as the Marriott Renaissance are offering kombucha to their Guests.

Kombucha is touted as a healthy drink that cures everything from cancer to giving better mental agility – and while it is actually mostly true about both of these (more in the article) – there’s still more fiction than fact around it.

First Up, What Is Kombucha?

You take tea, sugar and a SCOBY (a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) and you mix them together, and leave for at least a week. During this week, the fermentation begins and continues for as long as there’s a sugar source for the yeast in the SCOBY to feed on. Now as part of that fermentation process, healthy probiotics and amino acids are produced in the kombucha. These probiotics largely provide your gut with a new source of healthy bacteria. These “good” microbes can also improve many aspects of health, including digestion, inflammation and even weight loss (we’ll talk about this again shortly)

Now you know what kombucha actually IS, let’s get stuck into the ACTUAL kombucha benefits for women.

1. Good Gut Health For Woman

As a woman, you’ll no doubt heard about the importance of having good gut health. In fact, having good gut health should be one of your main health priorities. Scientists and medical researchers have long linked the gut to everything from IBS to mental health, and our gut is often referred to as our “second brain”. If you’re looking for the one major kombucha benefit for women – this would be my top reason for drinking it, for sure.

To live your best life, you’re going to be relying a lot on your microscopic gut bacteria to do a lot of the work to help you look and feel great. I say this, because your skin is an outside reflection of what’s happening inside your body. If you’re suffering with an illness, then it’s highly-likely that your complexion is suffering too. Inflammatory skin conditions like acne and eczema are probably in your life, and they can be miserable to live with.

Yes, kombucha can help with this, but luckily there’s many other easy and tasty ways to get your gut health in shape, and you may already be eating fermented foods such as:

• Sauerkraut
• Kimchi
• Pickles
• Kefir
• Jun

…and like I say, of course you already have a bottle of probiotic KombuchaWOW in your hand while reading this, right? Ahem.. 😉

All foods and drinks that are naturally-fermented products, produce some level of probiotics. It’s these probiotics that are one of the main tangible health benefits of drinking kombucha.

What Are Probiotics

Probiotics is a blanket term for the mixture of live microbes that live in our bodies. When talking about about our gut health though, we refer to them as the “gut microbiome” – usually just referred to as the “microbiome”

When our microbiome is in balance, we are healthier and have better digestion and usually have way fewer overall health issues.

What we eat and drink are huge influencers of whether our microbiome is going to be in balance or not. One of the best ways to keep a steady level of these good bacteria in our bodies, is to consume fermented products. And yes, kombucha would be one of these such products!

I go WAY deeper on JUST probiotics in this article I wrote, so feel free to read after this one if you want to know more. It’s a HUGE marker for good health though, so I encourage you to consume more fermented foods and drinks in your diet.

2. Kombucha Can Help You Lose Weight

Commercial Thailand kombucha brewers like ourselves make our kombucha with a blend of black, green and white teas.

While there are published scientific papers on black tea, it’s the studies around green tea that make the most exciting reading. With medical studies to show it boosts your metabolic rate in the short term, green tea could help you lose weight – which quite honestly makes it amongst the most important kombucha benefits for women. And I bet a lot of you reading this now, are thinking it should be the FIRST most important benefit 🙂

In fact, there are several studies (one here in Thailand) that show green tea may help reduce body fat, especially in the belly area, by increase the number of calories you burn. This helps to reduce belly fat, improve cholesterol levels and help with blood sugar control – which in itself, leads to a more stable appetite without resorting to eat additional snack foods and kanom between meals. So weight loss or maintenance can be easier if you choose kombucha over a sugary soda alternative.

One of these documented weight loss studies was a 12-week randomised controlled study involving 240 people with obesity.

In this study, those in the green tea group had significant decreases in body fat percentage, body weight, waist circumference, and belly fat, compared with those in the control group.

Read more in my detailed article on this here, but ALSO know that it’s going to be your consumption of the green tea in your kombucha, COUPLED WITH the exercise you’re going to be more likely to do, that will make the most profound difference to any weight loss you will experience. Your exercise – especially as a woman performing resistance training with weights – that will make the most drastic change to your body fat levels.

And I say that not only as a Phuket Kombucha Master Brewer, but also as a qualified and popular personal trainer in my past life!

3. Kombucha Contains Antioxidants

We’ve just talk about how tea is one of the healthiest beverages on the planet, so it’s time to expand on the antioxidants found in the green tea in kombucha.

This is because tea – especially green tea – contains many bioactive compounds, such as catechins and polyphenols. These polyphenols are natural compounds and are powerful antioxidants that have health benefits, such as reducing inflammation and helping to fight cancer. Catechins contain a chemical called epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), which has it’s main benefit of helping repair cell damage and reducing inflammation.

KombuchaWOW is made from a blend of black, green and white teas at its Thailand kombucha factory. It is these teas that primarily give the high levels of antioxidants found in its kombucha range.

Finally, more medical studies also show that tea drinkers have a reduced risk of prostate, breast and colon cancers. Green tea is higher in benefits than black or white tea, but these benefits are still found across all teas with varying amounts of antioxidants.

4. Kombucha May Reduce Heart Disease Risk

Throughout the world, it’s still heart disease that is the leading cause of death.

When Doctors are looking for evidence of good heart health, they take into account two main factors. These are the two types of cholesterol they find in your blood. Those two types are:

LDL – “bad” blood cholesterol
HLD – “good” blood cholesterol

We all have cholesterols in our blood – most of which is made by our bodies, and largely governed by our own genetics. But not all blood cholesterol are made the same! Rat studies(1)(2) show that kombucha can greatly improve those two markers of heart disease (“bad” LDL and “good” HDL), in just 30 days.

In fact, green tea drinkers have up to a 31% lower risk of developing heart disease^(4)(5)(6), a benefit that may also apply to kombucha providing it is made with a good percentage of green tea in its fermentation stages.

5. Kombucha For Managing Type 2 Diabetes?

It’s true! Largely considered a lifestyle disease, over 300 million people worldwide (including 10% of the Thailand population!) are living with Type 2 diabetes right now. As you may not know, type 2 Diabetes is characterised by high blood sugar levels and insulin resistance or an inability to produce insulin. The majority of cases are able to be traced to diet and exercise. Food and drink you consume really IS your daily medicine.

A study in diabetic rats found that kombucha slowed down the digestion of carbohydrates, which in turn, reduced blood sugar levels. It also improved liver and kidney functions.

Kombucha made with green tea is likely to be even more beneficial, as the green tea itself has been shown to drastically-reduce blood sugar levels.

In fact, a review study of almost 300,000 individuals found that green tea drinkers had an 18% lower risk of becoming diabetic, whilst another study in Japanese individuals found that those who drank the most green tea had an approximately 42% lower risk of type 2 diabetes.

6. Kombucha May Help Improve Brain Function

If you’ve drunk green tea before and felt more alert after it? Well, green tea does more than just keep you perked up; it may also help boost brain function.

The key active ingredient is caffeine, which you know to be a stimulant.

However, research has consistently shown that caffeine can improve various aspects of brain function, including mood, vigilance, reaction time, and memory.

Caffeine affects the brain by blocking an inhibitory neurotransmitter called adenosine. This way, it increases the firing of neurons and the concentration of neurotransmitters like dopamine (your brain’s “feel good” chemical) and norepinephrine (a “go faster and harder” brain chemical)

However, caffeine isn’t the only brain-boosting compound in green tea. It also contains amino acid L-theanine, which can cross the blood-brain barrier.

L-theanine increases the activity of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA, which has anti-anxiety effects. It also increases dopamine and the production of alpha waves in the brain.^(7)(8)(9)

Studies show that caffeine and L-theanine can have synergistic effects. This means that the combination of the two can have particularly powerful effects in improving brain function.^(10)(11)

Because of the L-theanine and the small dose of caffeine, kombucha made with green tea such as KombuchaWOW! may give you a much milder buzz than a regular cup of strong coffee.

Many people report having more stable energy and being much more productive when they drink green tea, compared with coffee.

Beware All Kombuchas Are Not Created Equal – Part 1: Pasteurisation

While many foods that could contain beneficial probiotics are available, chances are that they’ve most likely been pasteurised at a high heat that kills ALL microbes – including the beneficial “good” ones too! Sad face!

Food safety using pasteurisation means our food is safer to eat BUTTTT obviously it means not all fermented foods are created equal – a side effect of these pasteurised foods is that the process kills off good bacteria that could be beneficial to our bodies.

It’s only products that are not treated with heat or chemicals — like raw kombucha — that have the live bacteria that we know as probiotics.

When you’re out shopping, look for products such as KombuchaWOW and others that are labeled as “raw kombucha”, and TOTALLY IGNORE any kombucha that is NOT in a refrigerator. This means all the ones at the grocery store on a shelf – they’ve been pasteurised to within an inch of their life, and there’s likely nothing left that’s beneficial to you. I’m not a fan of “shelf stable” kombucha, in case that’s not obvious enough 😀

Beware All Kombuchas Are Not Created Equal – Part 2: Sugar

Sugar. That’s it. That’s the section all done! But seriously – with your average healthy diet allowing for around 25g of sugar per day, then you’re going to need to read your kombucha bottle labels carefully as many commercial brands in Thailand can contain up to 7g (7 teaspoons!) of added sugar in each 250ml bottle. That’s almost a quarter of your sugar allowance in just one bottle, and with many of you drinking 2 bottles per day for maximum gut health, then bang goes almost 50% of your daily sugar allowance.

At KombuchaWOW, we have our batches lab-tested and have less than 1g of sugar in each of of 250ml bottles. Because, awesomes.

Beware All Kombuchas Are Not Created Equal – Part 3: Alcohol

Alcohol levels vary MASSIVELY in home-brewed kombucha batches, so if you’re tempted to make it yourself (and you should try – it’s fun!), then just be wary that it’s impossible to predict how much alcohol ABV will be in your finished product. It can be as high as a strong beer in commercial kombucha – even though they’re supposed to be under the Thailand 0.5% ABV limit to be classed as a soft drink! So if that’s the case with commercial kombucha that’s supposed to be guaranteed to be under 0.5% ABV… how are you going to control the wild yeast that will be in your SCOBY so it will produce a healthy low-alcohol kombucha for you? The answer is you can’t, and no-one can. So choose commercial kombucha brands such as KombuchaWOW – where we get our batches lab-tested so we’re ALWAYS under the 0.5% ABV level.

Avoiding Foods With Histamines? Read This!

So any woman reading this with an increased reaction to histamine; DO NOT DRINK KOMBUCHA. Just don’t. After all, it’s a fermented drink and you already know you need to largely avoid fermented foods and drinks, so kombucha is no different. You will most likely have a reaction to it. Symptoms of a histamine reaction can be mild or severe. It can lead to asthma issues, skin reactions like hives, and migraine headaches. You know the deal. Avoid.

Final Thoughts

You have a lot of reading now on kombucha benefits for women, and it’s been a huge read, I know! Thank you so much for getting through it. As long as you stick to kombucha brands with low sugar like ours, AND you’re able to do daily exercise – even if it’s just a very brisk 10 minute walk to the local 7-11 AND you’re not eating too many processed foods, then raw kombucha will definately be a net benefit to your overall health. It should NOT be drunk by anyone looking for a quick fix to their health, but it’s also much better to drink a low sugar raw commercial kombucha (under 0.5% ABV!) than to choose a typical energy drink or soda or beer. Enjoy!

And as always, if you want to message Alice or myself (Nate), then head to our socials over at Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. We LOVE reading your comments. And hey – if you want to post a picture of you with our booch, or you want to do a few cheeky little KombuchaWOW reviews on your fave flavours, (*cough* mine’s Apple Pie *cough*) then please be sure to tag with #kombuchawow ..if we see your pic and like it, you might find a little something in your inbox from us!

Peace out and booch on!

Nate