Saccharomyces boulardii CNCM I-745
Touring Indochina during a cholera outbreak in 1920, the microbiologist Henri Boulard noticed that people who drank a tea concoction made with the skins of lychees and mangosteens did not develop diarrhoea.
Isolating a strain of yeast from the skin of these tropical fruits, he named it Saccharomyces boulardii; after himself. These first samples were sent back to the Collection Nationale de Cultures de Microorganismes (CNCM) at the Insitut Pasteur under the reference CNCM I-745.
Although part of the brewers yeast family, S. boulardii CNCM I-745 displayed very distinct properties making it a valuable microbe. It has a high resistance to stomach acids with an ideal growth temperature equal to the human body.
The first probiotic with proven and demonstrated preventive and treatment outcomes for diarrhoea, including antibiotic and post-antibiotic diarrhoea associated with Clostridium difficile, S. boulardii CNCM I-745 continues to be a mainstay of conventional healthcare, traveller’s diarrhoea prevention and the gut wellness industry.
As tea growers, members of my family regularly prepare tea with various blends of dried fruit peels and seasonal flowers and roots depending on their specific health needs at any given time.
Tea as a reMatriative practice exceeds a superficial performance of culture, and by extension, perpetuating the aesthetic and economic inequity of ‘wellness.’
Tea is in fact a mundane practice of daily resistance. Drinking tea reminds us to boil often contaminated water, to rehabilitate and repatriate our displaced microbiomes, to not waste food scraps, and to rethink the daily practice of making and drinking tea as part of a shared strategy to take back our ancestral objects and use them to keep alive our intellectual property.