May 27th, '07, 11:23
Posts: 2
Joined: May 27th, '07, 11:18
Contact: perpleXd

Milk bags benefits of tea??

by perpleXd » May 27th, '07, 11:23

Have you heard that adding milk to your tea purportedly eliminates its health benefits? Here is the most complete article I found:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 191523.htm

I wish I knew more about how the body breaks stuff down, because if they think that milk caseins form bonds with the antioxidants in tea, maybe those newly formed compounds just sit around in the stomach for a while until they are broken down by digestion and then absorbed as they normally would be.

Another reason these findings aren't totally convincing is their insistence on the word 'catechins.'--
"Their study showed that the culprit in milk is a group of proteins called caseins, which they found interacted with the tea to decrease the concentration of catechins in the beverage."
Other articles say that they only suspected the casein-catechin interaction but didn't know for sure, even though they also refer to the same study. In any case, my contention is that while green tea has a large concentration of the catechin type polyphenols, black tea only has about 1/4 the amount. Catechins are converted to theaflavins during the tea oxidation/fermentation process, an entirely different class of flavonoids which are practically non-existent in green tea but abundant in black. Theaflavins are responsible for the antioxidant activity that give black tea its benefits, and would presumably cause arterial dilation. In any case, milk does appear to bag this benefit in particular, but either the article or the scientists are mistaken as to the reason why.

And is the effect simply delayed rather than removed, until the body breaks the casein compound down? I mean, that is what digestion is for??

...Thoughts?