Is kombucha safe to drink while breastfeeding?

Kombucha is one of those ‘drinks of the month’ at the moment. Heralded for it’s health benefits, everyone is sipping some “booch” instead of reaching for soft drinks or coffee. If you’ve been drinking kombucha and are wondering whether you can continue doing so while breastfeeding, then this post is for you.

Kombucha is fermented tea. It is claimed to have health benefits because the fermentation leads to probiotic properties. It is important to note that the majority of kombucha is lactobacillus strains. From my experience in practice, seeing a number of Bioscreen stool analyses, many people with chronic health issues are already high in lactobacillus (and low in other bacteria), which means drinking kombucha is going to make your gut more imbalanced. 

Is kombucha safe for your baby?

Kombucha has caffeine in it. Babies have a caffeine half life of 48-72 hours. In adults, it takes 8 hours for half of our caffeine to break down. Basically, it means that any caffeine your baby is exposed to, it will take at least 2-3 days to break down half of it. 

Now, how much caffeine goes into your milk will depend on your physiology and also the amount of caffeine you’ve ingested. And how your baby will respond to that caffeine will also depend on your baby’s physiology too.

If you drink a kombucha, and your baby is irritable afterwards, then it’s likely kombucha is not a good idea.

 If you’re craving kombucha in the way someone might crave coffee, then you might be using it in an unhealthy way. Kombucha stimulates the adrenals to produce additional cortisol, which your body might want if you’re sleep deprived or exhausted from being a mother. However, if this is the case it will further stress the adrenals and potentially lead to adrenal fatigue. This is where the adrenals are forced to produce high amounts of cortisol for prolonged periods of time that the reach the point of fatigue and cannot produce enough cortisol.

I have digressed a little in this post, haven’t I? It is important for you to consider not only what kombucha is doing to your body, but also what it is doing to your baby’s body.

If you have had a stressful pregnancy, or diagnosed adrenal fatigue before/during pregnancy, this will impact your baby’s ability to handle stress. Why am I telling you this? Because then if you consider what kombucha is doing to your baby’s body, triggering some adrenal release of cortisol, if their body is already stressed from the pregnancy, is it possible that their system could easily get fatigued adrenals from small amounts of caffeine in the milk? This is my wondering, as I have noticed in practice that helping irritability in babies has better outcomes when I work with both mother and baby. There’s an undeniable connection between mother and baby that needs to be honoured.

If you have an irritable baby, and want some support, let’s work together!