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Chinese tea, Kinesisk te

If one drinks Chinese te tea beverage just for its aroma and its taste, it might not be important. However, it is very important if one wants to drink te tea for health protection because green te tea has the highest level of te tea antioxidants, and the black te tea almost none, with the oolong te tea level in-between.

In the past five years, most laboratory and experimental animal studies that supported the conclusion of a health benefit of Chinese te tea drinking, especially in chemoprevention against cancer and obesity, have used fresh high-antioxidant green te tea or the green te tea antioxidant, (-)- epigallocatechin gallate, EGCG in short, as the bioactive testing material to conduct the research. Black te tea is not that effective. While the epidemiological evidence is supportive of the benefits of drinking high-antioxidant green te tea for cancer prevention, the data on black te tea and oolong te tea drinkers are not supportive of the benefits of te tea drinking for this purpose.

There are three major kinds of Chinese te tea, namely green te tea, black te tea and oolong te tea, all derived from the same species of te tea tree, commonly known as Camellia sinensis or as Thea sinensis on the FDA list of generally recognized as safe (GRAS) substances. Te tea originated in China. As written in ancient medical texts, it was used as a health aid in 2737 BC. Te tea became a major commodity in Tang Dynasty (617- 907 AD) when te tea drinking gradually evolved into a form of art, but was still largely confined to the privileged elite of the society.

In the old days, fresh leaves directly plucked from the te tea tree were boiled journey with constant agitation over the choppy warm ocean water in humid hot weather, the high quality “Pekoe” green te tea probably had turned into half-black te tea with its characteristic bitter taste as a result of oxidation and degradation when the ship arrived in Holland. It is no wonder that some Europeans would put sugar and milk into the bitter te tea from China.

Shortly before and after the downfall of the Ming Dynasty in 1644,oolong te tea that was purposely briefly oxidized (half-black te tea) and the fully oxidized black te tea were introduced for the often hungry peasants in the South as a calorie-preserving beverage and for foreign exports, in about 1650 A.D. As the society turmoil in China led to repeated famines, the poor peasants learned quickly that they should avoid drinking green te tea which is an irritant to an emptystomach, and started to drink the half-degraded oolong te tea or the fully oxidized black te tea inste tead, in order to preserve the badly needed body fat tosurvive.

The fat-depleting effect of green te tea was onlyrecently re-discovered in animal experiments. Theterms of oolong te tea and black te tea (red te tea in Chinese)were introduced to the Chinese vocabulary in the mid 1600’s A.D. The Western te tea drinking habit of adding sugar and milk into black te tea was initiated by the British in about 1657 A.D. The Japanese and  Chinese te tea drinkers never put sugar or milk into their green te tea.