Tea and health

Health and Caffeine

The tea industry is using tea as a health benefit even when it has little benefit at all. Iced tea in particular.

Both tea and coffee contain caffeine. The German obsession with health was probably behind future development of decaffeinated coffee. From the 1890s to the 1930s, a growing number of Germans began to scrutinise and discipline their bodies in a utopian search for perfect health and beauty. Some became vegetarians, nudists, or bodybuilders, while others turned to alternative medicine or eugenics. It is no accident that the leading country for organic food today is Germany. Many consider that Germans are obsessed with their health. Samuel Hahnemann of Leipzig published his diatribe against coffee in 1803, Der Kaffee in seinem Wirkungen [Coffee and its effects] [i] and this was followed by the questionable theory of Homeopathy which he promoted from 1812. The discovery of caffeine by the German chemist Runge in 1820 was followed by the discovery of the decaffeination process by two Germans in 1905 leading to the establishment of Kaffee HAG.

By contrast there does not seem to have ever been a concerted campaign against the caffeine in tea and it seems that the market for decaffeinated tea today is very small compared to standard tea. The fact that it does not taste very good is not a help.

Green tea and black tea contain the same amount of caffeine. The amount of caffeine in a cup of tea will vary with the size of leaf, the brewing time and the temperature of brewing.

Antioxidants

Medical and scientific journals are full of the health benefits of green tea and newspapers spread the gospel to a waiting public who look for organic tea as a route to better health. Different green teas claim specific benefits with cures for everything. The source of the research is mainly in Japan and China where green tea is widely drunk. There seems little doubt that the same sort of benefits result from drinking black tea.

Tea has become one of the holy sacraments at the Temple of Health. Regular libations purify the body and soul.

Tea has a very positive image when it comes to health and scientific investigation would seem to justify it.[ii]

In 2012 the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health[iii]was held. Antioxidants play a large role in health studies about tea and I was very interested to see exactly what the connection was. The quantity of antioxidants will vary immensely with the way that you brew the tea. Some years ago I arranged for research to be done in China to show the level of antioxidants from a given weight of fine leaf tea brewed for 30 seconds and large leaf tea brewed for five minutes. Test results from the Hangzhou Tea Institute[iv] in China show that, weight for weight, very small leaf tea brewed for thirty seconds contains 160% more antioxidants than large leaf tea brewed traditionally for five minutes. People who believe that they derive great health benefits from brewing large leaf tea are likely to be disappointed.

As expected the results were conclusively in favor of small leaf tea showing a large increase over large leaf tea. When I communicated these results to the organizers and the researchers of the conference I got no response until I asked again and was told that my results could not be considered because they were not from peer reviewed research. What surprised me was that nobody even seemed interested in the results sufficiently to do their own research on this point. If your main topic of research is health, then I would imagine that when somebody claims to increase the health benefits from a given amount of tea, it is worth researching. Well, apparently not.

 Interpretation of table

Tea Polyphenols are the antioxidants.

Line one twice means three grams of FINE LEAF tea produces 25.8 grams TP compared with line 3 = 9.5 grams TP long leaf tea - 171% increase. Almost three times as much.

Line one times 3.33 means 5 grams of FINE LEAF tea is used compared to line 4 = 5 grams long leaf tea. 12.9 x 3.333 = TP 42.99 compared with line 4 = TP 10.5 means 4.09 times as much TP weight for weight.

Three and a third cups of large leaf of 5g tea brewed for five minutes produce as much TP as one cup fannings green tea made from 1.5g brewed for 30 seconds.

If you brew the tea twice – add lines 1 and 2, TP = 18.5 or 5.3 times as much TP as line 4.

The FINE LEAF tea was brewed tea for 30 seconds.

Conclusion: FINE LEAF tea fannings produces much greater health benefits than large leaf tea.

The results above have been well publicized to the tea industry and the fact that they have been ignored means that the large leaf tea industry is quite happy to reject science in the pursuit of profit.

Modern research has suggested an array of other potential benefits of tea that were not covered at the Fifth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Health, including antibacterial and antiviral activity, arthritis, dental caries, type 2 diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, impaired immune responsiveness, and neurodegeneration.

What does it mean to say that drinking tea has a positive response to health benefits when there does not seem to be any connection that I can find with what the average consumer drinks in a cup of tea? Normally when you go to a pharmacist with a prescription there is mention of the dose of the active ingredients in each tablet but this information is totally lacking for a cup of tea which can be brewed in so many different ways. If you are drinking Chinese tea the active ingredient is different in the first and every subsequent cup. If you are using a teabag the weight should be prescribed and the brewing time and the filtering material. Does it matter when you drink iced tea from a bottle when the antioxidant level is 1/20 that of a cup of tea? Of course it does. The tea industry seems happy to disseminate motherhood statements about tea and antioxidants and health which have no meaning in practical terms.

The tea industry is using tea as a health benefit even when it has little benefit at all. Iced tea in particular.

Probably the best health benefit from tea is that, if you are drinking it instead of a lot of alcohol, it is good for you.

[i] Samuel Hahnemann, Der Kaffee in seinem Wirkungen , Leipzig, Steinacker, 1803. 

[ii] https://conferencedocs.com/SysFiles/Brochures/Tea%20Health_2012.pdf  

[iii] https://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/98/6/1607S.full  

[iv] Test and Analysis Seal of Hangzhou Tea Academy, All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives September 27, 2009 Report No.: 200909002 Page 2