Kombucha for weight loss?

We get asked the question if kombucha helps you to lose weight.

And the answer is, if you are working on losing weight, switching from wine or beer to a low-alcohol alternative such as kombucha could make a significant difference to your calorie intake.

Gram for gram, alcohol has about as many calories as fat.

Swapping to a low-alcohol alternative

To illustrate the impact of switching to a low-alcohol alternative, I'll work through some numbers.  Let's assume that you are drinking no more than the 14 units per week now recommended by the UK Chief Medical Officers.  This is the equivalent of about nine 330ml bottles of 5% beer every week (every week, not every day!). 

Those nine bottles pack in about 1,188 calories, mostly from the alcohol content of the drink.  Swapping the beer for Left Field Kombucha would reduce the energy content by about two-thirds, saving 772 calories. 

Calorie counting

If you are a man following the NHS Weight Loss Plan, then those calories saved over a week make up 40% of your calorie allowance for one day.  Put differently, if you wanted to drink beer instead of kombucha, you would have to fast for half a day every week to keep under the calorie limit.

For a woman drinking wine (I'll go with the 1970's stereotypes, just for illustration, or will need to do more maths to change it to beer, but you get the gist), the effect is even greater. 

Fourteen recommended units of alcohol converts to six mid-sized glasses of 13% wine.  If those glasses of wine were exchanged for kombucha, 677 calories would be forgone.

Since the NHS guidelines advise only 1,400 calories per day for women who want to lose weight, ditching the wine for kombucha for a week would save just under half of one day's allowance.

Beneficial effects of kombucha tea

The figures calculated above take account only of the calorific content of a low-alcohol drink such as kombucha (0.5% abv) compared to beer or wine.  However, there is evidence from a variety of research studies that kombucha in particular has a range of additional benefits, as it might:

• enhance general metabolism
• boost energy
• help regulate appetite
• in addition to being good for digestion and detoxifying.

Green tea is regarded highly for improving digestion and weight loss, and green tea kombucha contains, of course, similar properties.

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