SuppVersity - Nutrition and Exercise Science for Everyone

Hot or not? That could be a matter of health or ah... well almost death ;-) Usually a "tea" is a hot beverage, right? No? Well, ok there's ice-tea, but even the coolest of all teas is initially brewed with hot, sometimes almost boiling water. A practice of which a recent study from the   Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná in Brazil suggests that it may actually impair some of the beneficial effects of Baldo, White, Black and Mate tea. How come? Well, in the study Vanessa de Carvalho Rodrigue, et al. conducted, it made a huge difference in terms of the total phenol and flavenoid content of the extracts (=the aformentioned teas) when the scientists used cold water instead of water that was 80°C "hot". You can learn more about tea at the SuppVersity Use Roiboos for Stress & Virus Control Tired? Theacrine Will Get You Goin' in Minutes Milk, Tea & Honey Don't Mix?! Theacrine or Caffeine for Brain Power? Aluminum, Lead...

Tea: An anti-oxidant carb-blocker with class - The Britons do it right - the always have a cup of tea with their scones. As a (hopefully) regular SuppVersity reader you will know that I don't buy into either the fructose or the sucrose theory of everything (diabetes, cancer, obesity, stupidity, etc.). This does not mean that I wouldn't understand that the average Westerner would largely benefit from a reduction in carbohydrate intake. A reduction that - and this is what a recent paper in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Preventive Medicine can tell us could be achieved by something as simple as drinking more tea (Oboh. 2014). Commercial teas turn out to be carb-blockers In said paper Ganiyu Oboh and his colleagues from the Federal University of Technology and the Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria report that: "The antidiabetic property of the teas could be attributed to their inhibitory effect on carbohydrate hydrolyzing enzymes implicated in diabete...

Would all commercially available teas have to be labeled like this? I am usually not a fan of articles with titles like this one (see above) - they have what you call in Germany "Bildzeitungsniveau" (the German tabloid with news like "World about to disappear in a black hole, when CERN starts operating). It is however hard to resist the urge to use a headline like the one above, if the it fits the results of peer-reviewed scientific paper so well, as it is the case with the relatively recent paper from the University of Alberta and the Luleâ University of Technology in Sweden this SuppVersity article is (almost) all about. The corresponding experiment, the results of which were published in the peer-reviewed open-access Journal of Toxicology in October 2013, already, addresses the increasing concern about contamination of foodstuffs and natural health products. With the emphasis being on foodstuff and health, it's only logical that tea, or more precisely all...

Image 1: This is still my preferred way to boost oxytocin - regardless of possible ergolytic effects ;-) Due to the sudden heat-wave over here in good old Germany I thought, I'd use these early morning hours to get another installment of " On Short Notice " on it's way before my brain dries out (or I drown in the public swimming pool ;-). I hope you enjoy the four items on the recent interest in intranasal the hormone modulating effects of oxytocin , it's effect on cortisol and progesterone, estradiol and (I know you were waiting for that ;-) testosterone, my early morning / late evening (depending on whether you see this from my or Wyatt's perspective) 'intellectual' exchange on the potential longevity effects of exercise and why it probably is not life-extending in the literal sense, the different antioxidant potency of green, black and white tea and their ability to chelate metals (=help to remove all not just "bad" metals from the ...

Image 1: Monkey milk tea by Conchibi . No matter how decorative it may look, according to various online sources, the milky monkey decoration is just about to annihilate the beneficial health effects of tea at the very moment it mingles with the antioxidant brew... or is this just another urban myth that is reaffirmed by ' gurus ' all over the Internet? Question from Samir Banga ( via Facebook ): "Just wanted to ask you about tea and if adding milk or cream for that matter disturbs or destroys the antioxidants/good stuff in the tea . Also would this be the same with black, green and white tea?" Answer Dr. Andro: This is one of the typical cases where just typing in a question in Google produces either answer A "tea with milk = no problem" or answer B "tea with milk = worthless swill" - it just depends on how you formulate the question - or maybe who on whether the milk industry advertises with Google? Who knows.... A more thorough investigat...