errantember

I've been brewing kombucha, with varying degrees of success, for some time now. I'm currently eating according to the Slow Carb Diet from the Four Hour Body, which means no refined sugar, fruit, or fruit juices, six days a week. Since I don't know how much sugar kombucha has left in it, especially with such a varied brew process, I went online trying to find out. I looked at about five different sources and methods, but the results were so varied as to be useless. I think the only way to get the real story on how much sugar remains in my brew is to test it. And while it would be pretty easy to test using, say, diabetic urine strips, for glucose, I'm actually a lot more interested in how much fructose (which is way worse in almost every way) is left. Anybody who has ideas on cheap ways to test for fructose content, please let me know!

I'll be switching from the Slow Carb diet to the Paleo Solutions (which is similar but with a few important differences) at the end of the month. At that point I'll be doing a short write up of my Slow Carb experience.

So after drying overnight, this is what's left of the kombucha SCOBY. It resembles very thin bacon. I used 190 degrees F for the drying temperature, and dried it outdoors to prevent being physically assaulted by the vinegary smell.

I had my first little piece with breakfast. It's totally dry to the point of being crispy. The vinegar flavor is still present, though comparatively mild. As reported elsewhere, there is a slight sweetness. This dry, it's a bit hard to chew. However, once in your mouth, it begins to re-hydrate and expand into something more rubbery, which makes it easy to find the parts that are stuck between your teeth.

I feel *slightly* queasy, but at this point I'm guessing it's more from the idea than from the actual "food." After reading Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions recently, I've become convinced that the vast majority of the quality of our health comes from the placebo affect, basically meaning that you *believe* you're going to be healthy. One way to do this is to adopt harmless-or-better rituals that continue to suggest to yourself that they make you healthy. Drinking kombucha is a good example of this kind of ritual. I'll be posting more about this in my upcoming review of that book.

We'll note that when I got tested for food sensitivities, yeast (candida albicans, at least, which is common baker's yeast) was at the top of my reactivity charts. However, the testing method Signet Diagnostics uses actually exposes one's live blood to undigested food, and measure the reaction of the immune system. While having some yeast in one's digestive tract is totally normal, having it inside one's blood stream is not! A strong reaction to an invading fungus inside the blood stream is 100% expected. I'm not sure what this says about the validity of the rest of the results. I definitely felt better after altering my diet to avoid foods that were supposed to be bad for me, and I seem generally to be less vulnerable to allergic reactions than I used to be, but I'm convinced this one result is bunk.