Watered Down Tea Nutrition

Tea is good for you. The chatechins and other anti-oxidants are obviously important for your health.

But something like tea can sit on the shelf for a long, long time before it makes it into your cup. How does that change the health properties … if at all??

This report looked at tea bags that were kept stored in their original packaging … in dark rooms … heated to 68 degrees Fahrenheit for one of five different lengths of time: one week, one month, two months, four months and six months.

Undesirable moisture exposure was not a factor.

“We found that among the teas we looked at there seems to be a progressive decrease in the amount of antioxidants as a function of time,” lead author Friedman said.

The team found at least some drop-off in catechin antioxidant content early on in the storage process, and went on to observe that by the end of six months catechin concentrations had plummeted among all eight teas by an average of 32 percent — a figure the authors characterized as “highly significant.”

Specifically, the most prevalent form of catechin (EGCG) decreased by 28 percent after six months of storage, while the second most common catechin (ECG) dropped by 51 percent in the same timeframe.

Friedman described his work as preliminary, and expressed the hope that the findings would prompt more research into the storage-antioxidant question, given the large variety of teas on the market and the strong probability that not all teas would experience nutrient degradation in exactly the same way or pace.

I guess the bottom line is that we need to eat foods close to the source of their growing, and close to the time of their picking.