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Ceylon Tea as Aphrodisiac (screen capture from site)
I’ve heard my share of extravagant claims for tea over the course of the years. Most of the time I just move on (nothing to see here). Once in a while I pause to engage in a bit of contemplative inner ridicule for a few moments, but every now and then I have to stop and comment on one.
The shrewd reader of headlines will have already surmised that I’m going to talk about Ceylon tea‘s alleged powers as an aphrodisiac. Which is a new one on me, by the way and one that popped up recently in a few news outlets, including this article that appeared in the New York Daily News.
One of the marketers who makes such a claim is the head of HVA Foods, which is said to offer a 60-gram jar of premium Ceylon tea for $350. Going by the standard measure for a cup of tea, that works out to somewhere in the general neighborhood of thirteen dollars for a cup of this supposed elixir. It’s not completely clear how one would lay their hands on this fine product and even the company’s web site doesn’t offer much more in the way of information.
The article goes on to discuss an allegedly similar product – a virgin white Ceylon tea – sold at a Paris tea shop for a mere $88 per 20 grams, which is a relative bargain at just under ten dollars a cup. What seems to be lacking in both cases is any hard and fast evidence that the claims for these pricey teas are true. The article doesn’t cite any studies, but a little bit of digging around on my part revealed that there was actually such a study done on Ceylon tea in 2008.
The test subjects were male rats who were given various amounts of Ceylon black tea, referred to in the study as black tea brew or BTB. Researchers concluded that “BTB can function as a quick acting, safe, oral aphrodisiac which may also be useful in certain forms of sexual inadequacies.”
Which, if I were a betting man, was not an outcome I’d have put any money on. And while it might be interesting to see what the end result was if the research had been carried out by someone other than university researchers in Colombo, Sri Lanka (the country once known as Ceylon), that’s enough said about that.
Disclaimer: This is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your physician for your particular needs.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Oolong Tea and others – should kids drink them or not? (stock image)
In the Age of Communication, publishing and distributing their thoughts and ideas is always at people’s fingertips. Actually, this is really great, and the world of tea has benefited hugely from this: there are myriads of tea bloggers, creators of websites or books or e-books related to tea, content writers and “niche journalists” out there now, boosting the general knowledge about tea and very probably the popularity of tea with their publications. However, as all things in the universe, the ease of creating huge volumes of information at no or low costs and the overall accessibility of this information has its downside: things are being discussed over and over again that actually wouldn’t need any discussion at all, but only some common sense instead.
So, in tea forums and blogs, I keep coming across the much discussed question, whether tea is good for children or not, and whether it is reasonable to let them drink some or not. And I keep thinking, ‘What a question’!
It all starts with most of these discussions never even defining what they mean when saying “tea” in the first place. This inevitably becoming apparent in the course of the discussion, the same usually ends with reaching a consent that herbal tisanes might be harmless for children, while “real” tea (Camellia sinensis: green tea, Oolong tea, black tea, white tea, yellow tea, Pu Er tea) is known to contain caffeine, or theine (same thing) and is therefore not good for children, at least not to a certain age.
While a little more differentiation would definitely do good here in the first place, if the topic needs to be discussed at all, as a father of two boys (one 16, the other 8 years old now) I just cannot remember that this question has ever been seriously arising.
Tisanes are harmless? Oh, my god! Won’t this depend on what tisane we are talking about? I don’t want to be too specific about this, since I don’t know much about tisanes, but common sense tells me there are probably harmless ones, such as chamomile or peppermint “tea”, and there are others that have partially powerful medicinal properties and effects, so I would think twice before considering them as ‘harmless’ for children.
Then tea, real tea… if you are drinking tea the way it should be done, i.e. without the highly questionable habit of adding sugar or milk to it, you will never ever have to think about this, because your kids are hardly ever going to drink more than a sip of it, and this more out of curiosity but for actually liking the taste. But even if they would drink a whole cup, how much caffeine will they really take in? And in terms of being unhealthy, how will a cup of tea compare to the sweets, fast food chain meals, sugary lemonades and chemically ‘enhanced’ trend beverages they take in on a daily basis as the average kid of today (without the question how healthy or unhealthy these are being much discussed)?
I am using aroma cups to try first steeps myself, and whenever one of the kids came on and asked to try some of my tea out of curiosity, I would fill one aroma cup for them and pass it on to them with my mind being at complete peace: even bragging about how much they like it, I can’t remember any of them ever asked for a second cup. So, following common sense instead of trying to become all scientific about this seems to make a lot of sense to me, or did you ever hear of a kid dying, or even becoming sick, from an overdose of tea?
See more of Thomas Kasper’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
British Tea Favourites
(Tea in this article means tea in terms of tea, the old Chinese cult beverage gained from different varieties of the Camellia Sinensis plant and processed in various different ways. Separate considerations would have to be made to cover this question for tisanes instead.)
If you’re a true tea geek, you must have come across this before: you love tea, you are preparing tea for yourself all day trough, you gain up to 10 steeps from your best Oolong teas… and at some point you realize that drinking pure water has come a little short recently. You say to yourself: never mind, there’s all the water of the world in my tea, and all in my tea that is not water is actually even healthy, so tea might just be the ‘better water’. A common perspective with many tea drinkers, but: is it really true? I will try to cover the subject a bit more comprehensively at the expense of the narrative form:
1. Yes, there is a lot of water in tea (as there is a lot of water in coca cola), but out body makes a difference between pure water and water+something regarding the way and method of processing: while both are landing in your stomach first, pure water will be passed on to the cells immediately, while tea will be considered as a “food stuff” by your body and therefore subjected to other processes first.
2. As with coffee, tea has often been claimed to be “dehydrating”. For coffee, research has in the past years demonstrated that earlier the dehydrating effects of coffee established in earlier studies might not be significant for small amounts of coffee up to 4 cups a day. These results must be seen in the light of the fact that
a) The newer studies claiming the insignificance of smaller amounts of coffee regarding dehydration effects have mainly been financed and designed by the coffee industry.
b) “Dehydration” is a much to undefined term here: it is well possible that coffee or tea do not “dehydrate” the human body in terms of withdrawing water from it, but will still affect the way the water in the liquid can be utilized/consumed by the body (see 1.), and/or otherwise compromise on the capacity to which the consumed liquid can be used by the body for any of the multiple functions pure water serves and fulfills.
3. “Theine”, or caffeine, has proven stimulating effects on the nervous system and other physical functions. These can be perceived both as positive (helping to stay awake, focused, etc.) and as negative (nervousness, insomnia). Given that the average adult human in average climate conditions will need 2 L of water per day, it might be worth considering, whether the described effects of theine are really desired to the extent involved with such volume consumption.
4. The Chinese school of tea expressively says that tea is not a replacement for water. It instead refers to tea as a luxury foodstuff or stimulant and emphasizes the importance of unreduced parallel water consumption.
I like to complete these points by adding my own experience as a tea geek, who definitely drinks an average of 2 L of tea or more a day:
When I started to drink a lot of tea a few years ago, automatically my water intake was reduced. While generally the effects were all positive during the day, I after a while realized that a) I still felt thirsty sometimes even during drinking tea, and b) I had often trouble falling asleep at the end of the day. What I did (and do now) is adding the consumption of full 2 L of water every day to my consumption of full 2 l of tea every day, and instead of stopping drinking tea in the evenings, I just drink well half a liter of water after the tea and before going to bed. As a result, my problems falling asleep have disappeared, I never feel thirsty anymore and I still never have to miss or compromise on my tea, in other words: apart from the corresponding increase in diuretic activity, which is probably even healthy, everything seems to be just fine with drinking both a lot of water and a lot of tea. Just like I had found the perfect solution to the problem.
See more of Thomas Kasper’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
French Blend Tea in cup (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
Is drinking tea bad for you? Clearly not. Yet this is the exact question asked by the title of a recent article in The Guardian newspaper. Apparently, some studies have suggested that drinking an excessive amount of tea can cause brittle bones. And by excessive, they really do mean excessive (a gallon a day), even by this tea enthusiast’s standards.
(I might add that, apart from being excessive, drinking this amount of tea every day would swiftly plunge me into serious debt).
It’s not exactly rocket science: eating or drinking anything in excess is bound to have some adverse effects on the body as it will be overloaded with one chemical or another, and at the same time deprived of necessary nutrients that the particular food or drink lacks. Why should tea be an exception? (The fact that it is tasty is not an acceptable answer!) Moreover, the specific claim about bone health is interesting, since in the past, there have been studies that suggest the exact opposite: that tea can contribute to bone health.
What is interesting about this article though, is that it provides a refreshing change from the countless studies that suggest tea is a wonder-substance, seemingly beneficial to just about every health issue a person could have. When I first saw the headline, I have to admit, I misread it; I am so used to seeing headlines about how beneficial tea is that I switched out ‘bad’ for ‘good’ in my head.
So where does this latest addition to the tea and health debate leave us? In pretty much the same place that we started: health studies have to be taken with a pinch of salt as every body is different, and use your common sense. Plus, what is more influential than a specific food or drink item is your lifestyle as a whole, and moderation is always a good way to go. Bottom line? Tea is tasty. Ergo, I will drink tea. Just not too much.
See more of Elise Nuding’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I’ve been mumbling and grumbling about tea, health, and weight loss for years. I’m tired of hearing myself rant about the topic, but I’ll start by briefly restating my position. I acknowledge that there are many studies indicating that tea is good for you. There are even some that suggest that tea has a connection to weight loss.
Expensive miracle weight loss tea? Hm… (Photo source: stock image)
Which is fine and good and I’m glad my beverage of choice might do me some good. But my primary interest in drinking tea is for the taste and everything else is superfluous. As for those people who want you to believe that tea effects miracle cures and melts the pounds away as you drink it, well, I hope you know better.
Every now and then I run across a site where they’re pushing some kind of miracle tea (usually plain old green or oolong, and I wager that it’s not the good stuff even) designed to boost health, burn fat, and whatnot. They typically make such outlandish claims and are so scammy looking that it’s laughable, but I can’t help wondering if they might convince some people who don’t know much about tea.
Just for fun I thought I’d briefly discuss one such site I ran across recently. It’s pretty much randomly chosen, and I’ll discuss it in vague terms and without naming names. For no other reason than what would be the point?
The first thing that strikes me about the site is that it looks kind of garish, but perhaps not overly so. The next thing I see is an intense focus on weight loss, though there is some cursory mention of health benefits. The product claims to be a blend of four teas (which must mean it’s four times as effective) but elsewhere it claims to simply be green tea. Later on in the proceedings it’s revealed that there’s also white tea and puerh in the mix.
Perhaps what grabbed me the most is how much effort – and text – was expended in an effort to sell, sell, sell, this amazing product. The home page unspools for what seems like an eternity, with paragraph after paragraph of the most astounding claims, interspersed with pleasant clip art images of pleasant looking people who have presumably shed the up-to-twenty-pounds-per-month the merchants claim is possible.
Then comes the punch line – the price – though I’d say it’s more like a punch in the gut. For a box of tea bags that I suspect are of similar quantity and quality to a mid-range brand that you’d buy at the grocery store (just an educated guess, mind you), you’re asked to shell out nearly fifty bills.
Which is a great bargain if this miracle product is all it claims to be and hey, they’ll even kick in for the shipping. Far be it from me to say this one’s not all it’s cracked up to be, but I think I’ll pass.
See more of William I. Lengeman’s articles here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Buyer beware. Don’t believe everything you read. Okay, they’re not the most original phrases, but when it comes to the marketing of tea and the many health benefits that it’s said to bestow on us, they’re appropriate maxims to keep in mind.
Green tea study (Photo source: screen capture from site)
My standard disclaimer here. Yes, I do believe that tea can have some benefits to the health of those who drink it. There’s just too much evidence in favor of this notion to believe otherwise. On the other hand, I certainly don’t believe everything I read when it comes to this sort of thing, and I think there are plenty of people out there who are prone to exaggerate the health benefits of tea in the name of commerce, among other things.
Take weight loss, fat burning, and that sort of thing. If you go on a casual skim through the Internet you could be forgiven for thinking that tea – and especially green tea – is a miracle elixir that will instantly melt away pounds and unsightly fat. But does it really? It’s a topic we’ve addressed in these pages before, including this article, but a recent article in the New York Times motivated me to take another look.
The focus in the article – as with so many studies on tea and health – was on a compound in tea called Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), which some believe is the magic ingredient that gives tea and tea extracts the power to melt away pounds and fat.
Which is all well and good and it would sure be nice, but it’s not necessarily true, according a pair of studies cited in the article. The verdict, at least according to one group of Canadian researchers, is that green tea “preparations” can cause a small amount of weight loss in overweight adults, but they ultimately concluded, “green tea had no significant effect on the maintenance of weight loss.”
The other study, conducted by researchers in the Netherlands and United Kingdom, wasn’t particularly bullish on the prospects for green tea extract to burn fat during exercise. Test subjects took the extract and exercised for either one day or seven, with no effect on fat oxidation in the former case and no significant effect in the latter.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
I tend to be cautiously skeptical when it comes to the many and varied health claims for tea. For my money tea is just fine as a beverage and, if it happens to benefit my health in any way, I’ll take that as a nice fringe benefit. As always, I caution the reader to approach the more lofty health claims for tea with a grain of salt or three. For a recent article on mixed messages about tea and one specific type of cancer, look here.
China Tea Sampler (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
All of which might seem like an odd way to start an article that reports on one of the latest such health claims, but given the content of said claim I can imagine some less than completely scrupulous marketer trying to convince their customers that tea is nothing less than a cure for cancer. Obviously, that’s a bit farfetched, but the report in question does give some indication that (as a glance at our headline suggests) green tea might help shrink tumors.
If epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) rings a bell, then you’ve probably been reading articles about the potential health benefits of tea, and more specifically, green tea. I took a closer look at this seemingly miraculous substance that appears in abundance in green tea in a recent article that appeared here. Not surprisingly, EGCG has been identified as the beneficial ingredient in the recent study on tumors.
It’s a study that was conducted by a team of Scottish researchers at the University of Strathclyde. Results of the study were published recently in the journal Nanomedicine. The research team applied EGCG to tumors intravenously and found that within a period of one month nearly two-thirds of the tumors had shrunk or disappeared altogether. This is said to be the first time EGCG has been successful in shrinking tumors, a fact that researchers credit to the intravenous application method.
For more on possible links between tea and cancer treatment and prevention, here’s an article that appeared previously at this site and here’s one that appears at the American Cancer Society Web site.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
The litany of potential health benefits for green tea continues. For anyone who might have missed it, the latest in this multitude of possible benefits is the notion that green tea might help enhance memory. For more on how tea can help other brain functions, refer to this article from a few years ago. It looked at potential benefits in the area of spatial learning, memory, cognitive capability, and learning ability, as well referencing a study on the calming effects of theanine, a compound found in tea.
Chai Green Tea – click on image to see many more green tea options! (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
The study on tea and memory was conducted by researchers from China’s Third Military Medical University and published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research. Researchers focused their attention on a compound known as epigallocatechin-3 gallate or EGCG, which is especially plentiful in less processed types of tea, such as green. EGCG is commonly cited as a beneficial compound in tea, as noted in this overview, which was recently published in these pages.
While the EGCG in tea gets the most attention for its antioxidant properties the Chinese research team studied its potential ability to impact “the generation of neuron cells, a process known as neurogenesis,” as the head of the project put it. In tests on mice, the group studied the part of the brain that processed information from short to long-term memory and found that the EGCG contained in tea increased the production of neural progenitor cells.
Researchers performed tests on two groups of mice who were trained to perform various memory-related tasks. One group of mice was given EGCG and the other was not. The research team found that mice in the group that was given EGCG were able to complete these tasks in less time than the control group. As a result they came to the conclusion that “EGCG enhances learning and memory by improving object recognition and spatial memory.”
For more on the study, refer to this press release from the research team. For free access to the full (but not very layperson friendly) study, look here.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
If you’ve been following the numerous reports about tea’s alleged health benefits in the media (including the ones at this site) in past years, then you’ve probably encountered a mouthful of a term known as epigallocatechin-3-gallate. Which is one of the most often cited beneficial compounds found in tea and one that’s typically shortened to the more manageable acronym, EGCG.
Lots of goodness in a cuppa! (Photo source: A.C. Cargill, all rights reserved)
A compound in tea that’s known as a catechin, EGCG has antioxidant properties and is found in the greatest quantity in tea that undergoes minimal processing, such as green, white or yellow. Of course most of the attention regarding its supposed health benefits has been focused on the most popular of these – green tea. While it might not be a completely scientific method for gauging the interest in this substance consider that a search for EGCG at Google Scholar for the eight-plus months of this year returns 85 results. At the PubMed online library for the National Insitutes for Health, a search for EGCG returns a total of more than 300 results for all dates.
Though EGCG is found in tea, it can also be isolated and made available in supplement form. It apparently does not occur in any other foods or beverages other than tea. In more technical terms, EGCG “is the ester of epigallocatechin and gallic acid,” which will probably mean as much to the average reader as it does to yours truly. Add to this the fact that there are various and seemingly interchangeable terms for tea’s different compounds – such as flavonoids, polyphenols and the aforementioned catechins – and the issue can tend to get somewhat muddled for us laypeople. For what it’s worth, you can take a look at the definition for each of these terms here, here, and here.
A Web search for more information on EGCG can be a bit frustrating, given that it returns so many results for makers of supplements and related products, some of them perhaps just a bit dubious. For a serviceable overview that goes into a little more detail, try the Wikipedia entry. For studies that have focused on EGCG’s effect on specific diseases and conditions, try the PubMed library, as already noted.
© Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog, 2009-2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this article’s author and/or the blog’s owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Online Stores, Inc., and The English Tea Store Blog with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
Ti Kuan Yin Slimming Oolong (Photo source: The English Tea Store)
Tea sellers are probably not all that different from merchants seeking to push any other kind of product. There are the good, the bad and the ugly, though in the case of tea, I can safely say that the majority of those I’ve run across appear to fall into the former category.
But not all of them. If you doubt that there are unscrupulous types out there looking to make a buck off of tea, then let me direct you to your search engine of choice and suggest the search term “tea and weight loss” or something like it. There are also those merchants who tend to exaggerate the potential health benefits of tea, in varying degrees.
None of which is particularly new. As I noted in this article a while back, in which I looked at an 1820 text that examined the practice of adulterating tea and other foods and beverages in the pursuit of illicit profit. Some years later, in 1889, the case of Kenny v. Gillett came before the courts in Maryland and looked at whether the defendant had engaged in deceptive marketing practices regarding the tea they were selling.
Said defendant was Martin Gillett & Company, Importers, a Maryland-based concern which had already been doing business for three generations and nearly eight decades. At issue was a product they called He-No Tea or Standard He-No Tea. The gist of the issue, to simplify the somewhat dense legalese a bit, is that the company had filed suit against a certain Cornelius D. Kenny for trademark infringement for marketing a product called Hi-Hi Tea.
Which, as the court decision noted, may have been a valid point but was rendered moot due to the fact that Gillett’s “trade-mark is accompanied with statements in their label so plainly calculated to deceive and mislead purchasers that they cannot rightfully claim equitable interference.” The deception here, according to the decision, came in leading potential customers to believe that there was a variety of tea called He-No, which was popular with the Chinese and which was what was actually being offered. This was not the case. While the components of He-No Tea did come from China, it was actually a blend of at least three different tea varieties.
For a more in-depth look at the case, refer to this document.
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