Brewing tea at home offers more health benefits than drinking it commercially bottled.
The reason is surprisingly simple. The polyphenols that are the source of anitoxidants have what researchers described as a bitter, astringent taste. Making commercial tea products taste sweeter means using less tea. That in turn decreases the polyphenol content.
Commercially bottled tea products also contain sugar, adding calories that home-brewed tea avoids. So the ideal of tea as a healthy beverage doesn’t always match what the consumer is drinking.
Researchers found that in six bottled teas, 81, 43, 40, 13, 4, and 3 milligrams of polyphenols were found. An average home-brewed tea, either black or green, contained between 50 and 150 milligrams. A teabag may contain as much as 175 milligrams, but in hot water, polyphenols are lost to some extent.
Home-brewed tea costs only a few pennies per cup, and is the next-most consumed beverage in the world after plain water. The study notes that in the United States alone, tea sales have quadrupled since 1990, most likely because of evidence that the antioxidants in tea may lessen risks of both cancer and heart disease.
This report about tea was given at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston on August 22. The scientists said that some bottled teas contain such small amounts of polyphenols that consumers would have to drink 20 bottles to make up the amount found in one cup of tea brewed at home.
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