Category Archives: Health
Is Your Tea Gluten Free?
The answer to this question should be easy. All tea comes from the Camellia sinensis plant. It is not grain. It contains no gluten.
For those casually following the gluten-free lifestyle, that answer should be enough. But for those with celiac disease, a bit more detail may be required:
A lot of things are called tea that aren’t tea
As the first paragraph said, real tea comes from Camellia sinensis. But many (most?) people refer to anything that involves steeping leaves or flowers in hot water as tea: yerba mate, rooibos, chamomile, honeybush, and so forth. Technically, they are tisanes or infusions, but they are often sold as tea.
So if you’re buying actual black tea, green tea, oolong, pu-erh, or white tea, all is well. If you’re buying “herbal tea,” you’d better take a closer look at that label.
But wait…
Flavored teas have all kinds of additives
You may be getting a nice black tea that’s totally 100% gluten-free, but many flavored blends are sweetened. One of the things they may be sweetened with is malted barley, which does contain gluten. There’s not going to be very much of it, but it may be enough to cause problems for celiac patients.
So if you’re buying unflavored straight black tea, green tea, oolong, pu-erh, or white tea, all is well. If you’re buying flavored teas, you’d better take a closer look at that label.
But wait…
Gluten in teabags? Really?
A number of tea companies use sealants for their teabags that contain gluten. There’s no gluten in the tea itself, but once you dip that bag in boiling water and the glue starts to melt, you’re picking up a tiny bit of gluten. By “tiny bit,” we’re talking a few parts per million in the brewed tea here, which is a tiny fraction of what it takes to cause reactions in someone with celiac disease. But if you’re actually looking for ZERO gluten content, we’re not quite there yet.
So if you’re buying loose-leaf unflavored straight black tea, green tea, oolong, pu-erh, or white tea, all is well. If you’re buying teabags, you’d better take a closer look at that label.
But wait…
Cross-contamination
Now we’re getting into incredibly small amounts, but some tea companies use the same facility for manufacturing tea as they use for manufacturing products that contain gluten. There is a possibility of airborne cross-contamination from those products.
At this point, we might as well be talking about any other food product on the planet. Can we guarantee that there wasn’t a wheat field next to the farm where your tomatoes were grown? A big mug of tea might use 7 grams of tea leaf. Cross-contamination at 1 ppm means 7 micrograms of gluten. That’s about one millionth of the gluten you’d get from a couple of slices of bread or a pint of beer.
According to this article, “research has suggested that a daily gluten intake of less than 10 milligrams (mg) is unlikely to cause significant damage to the intestines in most people with celiac disease.” The gluten you’d pick up from teabag glue or cross-contamination is less than a thousandth of that amount.
That same article says that, “In most parts of the world, regulations say that to be labeled gluten-free, a product can contain up to 20 parts per million (ppm) of gluten.” That means a slice of gluten free bread could still contain 100 times the gluten of a cross-contaminated cup of tea!
I am not a nutritionist, medical practitioner, or scientist, but I think those numbers make it pretty clear that if someone with celiac disease wants to drink a few cups of tea every day, it’s going to be just fine.
As I write this, I’m sipping on a cup of Jinxuan Jade Oolong, a rich buttery semi-oxidized tea that has replaced Iron Goddess of Mercy as my regular morning cup. I steep it 3:00 in boiling water, and then get three more cups out of it, adding a half-minute of steep time to each successive infusion. Although it is of the “milk oolong” style, it contains neither milk nor gluten.
What’s the Healthiest Tea?
Unlike some of the other questions I address here, this one has a very straightforward answer. The healthiest tea is the one you’ll actually drink.
Figuring out which specific tea has the most health benefits is a complex task. Most styles and brands don’t have lab analysis of their antioxidant content, caffeine levels, and other details. Many scientific reports and studies are being misinterpreted, and others are being oversimplified.
Here’s the bottom line, though: if you don’t like the taste of a tea, you won’t want to drink it. You’ll have fewer cups per day. You’ll use smaller cups. You’ll use less leaf.
But if there’s a variety that has a bit less benefit — perhaps half of those healthy amino acids you’re after — and you love the flavor, you’ll drink more. You’ll use one of those big American mugs instead of a dainty British teacup. You’ll make it stronger. You’ll sneak in extra cups because you enjoy it. And even though each cup has less of what you’re trying to get, you’ll get a lot more.
So if your goal is to drink more white tea, don’t just buy a pound of the first (or cheapest) white tea you find and choke it down. Experiment! Try a variety of white teas and buy the one you really enjoy drinking. If you want green tea and you don’t like the Chinese variety you tried, try a few Japanese green teas.
Whether you’re in this for the health benefits or for because you enjoy tea, it’s fundamentally all about the taste!
Tea, Hydration, Elevation, and Good Moods
I have heard it since I was a kid: Drink plenty of fluids means water. It doesn’t include caffeinated beverages like tea. That statement didn’t come with much explanation when I was little. Later, Mom explained that only clear liquids count. I couldn’t figure out why 7-Up was okay when I was sick, but iced tea wasn’t. When I got married, my wife explained to me that it was the caffeine that caused the problem. Caffeine, you see, is a diuretic. That means it makes you pee. The more you drink, the less hydrated you are. This explanation has always bothered me, but I never went to the trouble to research it for myself.
Until now.
I came across a paper entitled Caffeine ingestion and fluid balance: a review, by R.J. Maughan and J. Griffin. They reached the conclusion that large amounts of caffeine consumed by people unused to caffeine can, indeed, cause dehydration. On the other hand, people who regularly drink caffeine can consume quite a bit of it without a problem. To quote their results directly:
“The available literature suggests that acute ingestion of caffeine in large doses (at least 250-300 mg, equivalent to the amount found in 2-3 cups of coffee or 5-8 cups of tea) results in a short-term stimulation of urine output in individuals who have been deprived of caffeine for a period of days or weeks. A profound tolerance to the diuretic and other effects of caffeine develops, however, and the actions are much diminished in individuals who regularly consume tea or coffee. Doses of caffeine equivalent to the amount normally found in standard servings of tea, coffee and carbonated soft drinks appear to have no diuretic action.”
In conclusion, when I am sick and/or dehydrated, I may feel free to drink my tea.
But wait! It gets better! I came across another paper entitled The effect of drinking tea at high altitude on hydration status and mood by D. Scott, J.A. Rycroft, J. Aspen, C. Chapman, and B. Brown. This is an absolutely awesome study, simply because they performed it at Mt. Everest base camp. It’s not a statistically valid sampling (only 13 people participated), and I’m not sure how valid a study performed at 17,500 feet altitude is for us lowlanders at 5,500 feet. But, hey, it was done at Mt. Everest base camp, and the procedure they used in the study does seem reasonably rigorous.
To put the results in their own words:
“The study shows therefore that even when drunk at high altitude where fluid balance is stressed, there is no evidence that tea acts as a diuretic when consumed through natural routes of ingestion by regular tea drinkers, but that it does have a positive effect on mood.”
Immediately upon reading this, I began putting together a list of people that might benefit from a few cups of tea. There are even those rare occasions when my own mood is not particularly sunny and bright. Not many, of course, but I must be prepared and have some good tea set aside for those moments.
Alas, upon closer reading I discovered that the “positive effect on mood” is actually “subjects reporting reduced fatigue when tea was included in the diet.” Oh, well. If you think about it, tea has long been touted as a good relaxant, so this particular finding makes sense.
With my hopes for a worldwide cure for bad moods rudely dashed, I shall have to fall back on tea as a way to hydrate and reduce fatigue. Sounds like the perfect thing to have along on a hike or at the gym. Surely that’s no surprise to my tea-loving readers!
Kombucha: A Tea Guy’s Perspective
Several times in the last couple of years, people have come in to the tea bar and asked if we have kombucha. The first time, I did a quick Google search, looked at the process required to brew it, and said no. After the third time, I figured I should look a bit deeper into this phenomenon. Conveniently enough, the Healthy Beverage Expo was held in Las Vegas alongside the World Tea Expo (the largest trade conference in the tea business), so I was able to sign up for a kombucha seminar to go along with all of the tea seminars I was taking.
I learned quite a bit in the seminar, although virtually none of what the instructor covered was applicable to a tea shop serving freshly-brewed drinks. Almost everything she talked about applied to RTD (ready-to-drink) bottled beverages, which really doesn’t interest me. We don’t serve bottled tea or soda — or even bottled water — so RTDs didn’t really interest me much. I was there to learn about fresh beverages.
Following the seminar, I did some further research and made an informed decision about selling kombucha in my tea shop. Here is my thought process:
What is kombucha?
Kombucha is a fermented drink made from a fairly heavily sweetened black tea (about 1 cup of sugar per gallon of tea), although other types of tea can be used as well. A symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast known by the acronym “SCOBY” (it stands for “Symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast”) is placed on top of the tea blend. It grows into a gelatinous mass on top of the tea as it ferments the sugars in the tea mixture. After a week or so, the freshly grown bacteria/yeast mat can be separated out into a new SCOBY for the next batch, and the liquid can be drawn off to drink.
It’s really good for you, right?
First of all, I don’t select teas based on health claims. I select teas that taste good. At times, those goals align, but I’m frankly underwhelmed at the amount of hard data backing most herbal health claims, and I’m not going to pass on health claims to my customers unless they are backed up by honest-to-goodness, peer-reviewed, reproducible studies — preferably with double-blind clinical studies.
Sitting in the kombucha seminar, I was struck by the PowerPoint slide titled “Health Benefits.” It listed every imaginable ailment from cancer to Alzheimer’s, heart disease to diabetes. The list was absolutely stunning. Before I had a chance to react, someone else in the audience asked what the basis was for this list. The instructor informed us that she had recorded everything her friends, family, and customers had told her. If someone told her they drank kombucha and their gout got better, she’d put gout on the list.
In other words, all of these health benefits were unconfirmed hearsay with no scientific basis whatsoever. A short amount of digging brought me to an article on kombucha by the American Cancer Society. I think one quote from that article sums it up really well:
Available scientific evidence does not support claims that Kombucha tea promotes good health, prevents any ailments, or is works to treat cancer or any other disease. Serious side effects and occasional deaths have been linked with drinking Kombucha tea.
Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
Logistics of kombucha
In a tea bar environment, I have dried leaves with a shelf life measured in months. The few fresh items I need, such as milk, boba pearls, and lemon slices, can either be purchased on a moment’s notice at the grocery store, or made in a matter of minutes. Kombucha requires at least a week to brew, which means if you want to serve it fresh, you need to be very good at predicting demand a week in advance.
If you wish to store and keep it, you have to bottle or keg it, and that takes me back to the RTD issue I opened this article with. If I’m going to serve a bottled beverage, I’d might as well buy it from someone else instead of trying to ferment it myself.
Fermentation leads to another issue as well. The yeast in the SCOBY does exactly what yeast does in beer or wine: it consumes sugars and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide (CO2). The CO2 provides carbonation, most of which is allowed to escape. The alcohol is another issue. The Federal government puts strict controls over alcohol content in beverages. If you wish to sell fresh-brewed kombucha, you must carefully control and measure the amount of alcohol.
Not only can we not sell beverages to children if they contain more than a fraction of a percent alcohol, but without the proper licenses, we can’t produce alcoholic beverages in the tea bar anyway.
My conclusion
I used to do a lot of homebrewing. I really enjoyed making and drinking my own beer. If I still had all of my equipment set up for the beer, I’d probably brew up a batch of kombucha just for fun, although I’ve yet to try a kombucha that didn’t taste like old gym socks. I’m not, however, going to make it in the tea bar because the logistics are complex, it doesn’t fit the business model of freshly-brewed tea, and the health benefits are unsubstantiated.
Tea and relaxation
If you’re looking for a whole afternoon of spirited discussion, ask an herbalist, a tea expert, and a doctor about the relaxing properties of tea. Any such discussion is immensely complicated by the dizzying variety of tea available, the thousands of herbal blends (“tisanes”) that herbalists call tea, and the dearth of comparative scientific studies.
My wife and I attended several sessions at World Tea Expo this month that discussed caffeine and health benefits of tea, and (since our tea bar is in our bookstore) I’ve read quite a bit on the subject. I think I know less now than I did when I started, but let me pass on a little of what I’ve learned.
All generalizations are wrong (including this one)
Virtually all of the comforting over-generalizations we pick up from Oprah or Dr. Oz are wrong. Green tea has no caffeine? Yes, it does. In fact, matcha (powdered Japanese green tea) had the highest caffeine content of any tea tested in the study presented at World Tea Expo 2012. White tea has the most antioxidants? Again, not necessarily. Oolong is just black tea that wasn’t allowed to ferment all the way? Wrong on two counts! Black tea isn’t fermented (it’s oxidized — pu-erh tea is fermented), and oolong uses a completely different process from black tea.
I have a different take on the subject, though. When I’m thoroughly stressed out and I fix a cup of tea, I don’t attribute the calming effects of the tea on chemical content, antioxidants, caffeine levels, or mystical magical herbal properties. I believe there are three factors at play: ritual, scent/taste memory, interruption, and expectation.
Ritual
Even before I have my first sip of the completed beverage, I can feel the stress slipping away just by going through the ritual of getting out my favorite cup, heating the water, measuring the leaves, and steeping the tea. Ritual is comforting and familiar; it is the basis of techniques like yoga.
When I got sick as a little boy, the ritual was always the same: my mother would tuck me in to bed and make me a hot cup of tea and a couple of pieces of toast. Then, it was just cheap teabags and white toast. Today, it would be Huang Jin Gui oolong and rye toast. But either way, the ritual has a soothing effect all its own.
This is one of the advantages to brewing a fresh cup of tea instead of pouring some iced tea from a pitcher or popping the top off of a can or bottle.
Scent/Taste Memory
Much has been written about the power of scent memory. A whiff of rose and I’m transported back 25 years, walking through a rose garden in San Jose, California with my wife. One sniff of skunk and I’m in junior high school with my best friend, Brian, rubbing tomato juice into his dog’s fur. A hint of rum and … well, let’s not go there.
If tea is a part of your relaxation ritual and you make a point of relaxing with a cup of tea, then the aroma and taste of tea will have a calming effect, whether your tea of choice is a strong malty Assam, a delicate silver needle, or a rich shu pu-erh. Slurping down a bottle of RTD (ready-to-drink) tea just isn’t the same as savoring the aroma of a fresh-brewed cup of tea and swirling that first taste around your mouth.
Interruption
Never underestimate the power of interruption. My father always told me when I got frustrated or angry I should take a break and do something else. When I hit a roadblock in my writing, I can often get past it by stepping away from the keyboard for a little while. Again, this is why it works to prepare a cup of tea. The whole time you’re putting the water on to steep and browsing the cabinet for the right tea to drink, you are focused on something other than the problems of the day. Take a deep breath, take your time, and you’ll feel the soothing effects of the tea before you even drink the tea.
Expectation
If you think something will calm you down, it will. Doctors call this the placebo effect, and it really does work — it’s the entire basis of homeopathy, for example, where they give you very expensive water and it actually has an effect on some people because they believe it will work. Since the word “placebo” carries negative connotations, I will just refer to the power of expectation.
This works with no appeal to authority at all, but it works better when someone you trust makes the suggestion. If a shady-looking huckster on a street corner sells you some tea that’s “guaranteed to mellow you out,” it probably won’t help you. If a doctor (or herbalist, or your mother) gives you the exact same tea and says it will calm and relax you, it probably will.
If you put all of these elements together, you realize that there’s no magic to the relaxing properties of tea. It works, and it works for a lot of reasons. In fact, it worked very well for me earlier today. So grab a spot of tea, keep calm, and stay relaxed!
Tea With Gary 