Adding Milk to Tea: Good or Bad for Health?
Is adding milk to tea bad for health? This Tea Guardian article examine the concept referencing a few recent scientific findings
As the world gets more connected and scientific findings more frequently quoted in mass media, those in cultures where tea has often been consumed with milk are aspiring to drinking tea straight, hoping to benefit more from the wonder leaf’s health potency. However, is adding milk to tea really hampering tea’s health benefits, or is it just a myth? Is it true that green tea is a lot more potent for health?
Let’s forget about what is said in New York Times or London Tribune. Let’s get our information first hand from scientific reports, as we always do at the Tea Guardian.
Here’s how they defend their teabags at PG Tips and Lipton
In 1998 a few scientists in the Netherlands gathered 12 individuals as test subjects to test their catechins level in the blood after drinking tea with and without milk and concluded that the amount of catechins in the blood is the same whether the tea was consumed with milk or not (1).
Catechins in tea are often studied as a bench mark for tea’s health potential, since they are a most potent group of phytochemicals in tea (2).
So you think that answered your question, but there is more detail to it. This research was conducted at a Unilever facility. Unilever, which hold many brands of various consumer goods, is the world largest tea packer and merchant for mass market tea and tea products. Lipton’s and PG Tips are some of their tea brands. The scientists in the above mentioned test have used only black tea products from their own brands. Very shady, isn’t it? What is more interesting: black tea has a lot less catechins than any other tea categories, and tea bags are the worst (3). There really is not much meaning when measuring whether there would be any worsening of the health potency of the least potent of all tea products.
Corporate Tea is good at clouding the consumer’s perception of things by producing scientific reports with comforting conclusion for the users of their products. The devil is always in the details.
Bioavailability, imitated
Let’s look at the excerpt of another report. This time, the scientists tried to imitate the biochemistry that happens through our digestive duct to see the amount of catechins that would still be available for absorption at 3 different stages of the digestive process, when the tea is consumed with or without milk. They concluded that it is roughly the same. This study was done in 2011. When it’s more update, it should be more reliable, one should think.
However, I have a habit of reading original study reports rather than relying on excerpts. Truth often lies in the details after all.
So I went through the usual materials and methods, results and discussion etc. The scientists used much of the paper discussing full cream milk and skim milk and how sucrose may be stabilizing the availability of catechins etc but only very sparingly on the change of the catechins themselves, nor the quality of the tea (4). Naturally, such a report comes from nowhere else but the research headquarters of Unilevers in the Netherlands. Again, only black tea teabags of their own brand.
Can we get something without corporate influences
I am not skeptical of reports commissioned by large corporations simply because of my rebellious sentiments, but rather because of the biased view points that they have consistently showed before. Furthermore, working on the basis of originally poor availability of catechins in their products and having to measure off from the effects of such basis simply is not persuasive. More independent studies of this topic, rare as they are, have shown other results…
