Re:Today's Wall St Journal

[Guest guest]

After reading the article in the Wall St Journal, I sent the following

letter to the editor:

To the Editor:

My husband and I have subscribed to the Wall Street Journal for the past 16

or 17 years. I enjoy the paper, and I have read the articles like this one

(we used to call them the center column article) every day since I was in

college.

I am very disappointed in the lack of fact checking in the article on

Kombucha tea (KT) in today's Wall Street Journal (6/23/2007). There are many

errors of fact in this article; and a little research by the writer would

have prevented these errors. One of the errors poses a health risk to people

reading the article who decide to make KT themselves. In addition, you do

not give any advice on where to go to get help making KT.

The writer says " When made at home, the container is typically covered with

cheesecloth: " This is dangerously misleading. When made at home, people who

know what they are doing NEVER cover the containers with cheesecloth: the

brew attracts fruit flies and these little bugs can go through cheesecloth

as though it is not there. If they infest the culture, they will propagate

and the resulting infestation will destroy the whole brew. Not only the brew

but the culture HAS TO BE discarded. No one wants to lose their culture, and

this piece of mis-information could cause serious health problems for

unsuspecting readers. Reading the statement about cheesecloth, a reader

might decide to make their own tea and use cheesecloth to cover the

container with no knowledge of the risk the cheesecloth poses. See

http://happyherbalist.com for better information on brewing KT.

The incident in Kansas in 1995: The incident occurred in Iowa not Kansas.

According to the *Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA)*, Jan.

10, 1996: Two Iowa women contracted lactic acidosis. One died, the other

recovered. Both had been drinking Kombucha tea for about two months.

Investigators were never able to establish a causal link between the

illnesses and their consumption of the tea so the cause of their metabolic

disorders was NEVER determined. The writer would have found this if she had

done her research and not depended on an interview with someone who

attributes loss of profits to the original report.

The culture for making Kombucha Tea is called a SCOBY (for *s*ymbiotic

*c*ulture

*o*f *b*acteria and *y*east). It is not called a Kombucha. The SCOBY does

make a baby in every brew, but this is not necessarily the culture used for

the next batch. Most people use the same culture many, many times.

The most in-depth writing available on this beverage is not by Betsy Pryor:

it is by Alick & Mari Bartholomew in a book titled Kombucha Tea, originally

published in 1998 and republished at least twice since then.

As for the taste: most people I know who brew their own KT enjoy the taste.

Yes, it is startling the first time you drink it, but the tea grows on you,

and home-brewed KT is quite tasty. None of the commercial brews taste

anything like the home brews. And the idea of a commercial maker sweetening

the tea " generously " eliminates much of the health value of the tea, making

it just another sweet drink with too much sugar to be healthy.

I hope that the Wall Street Journal will make these corrections in a

subsequent issue of the paper, and I hope that there is more fact checking

on most of your articles than was done on this article.

Sincerely,

Joyce