White Tea Study Reveal Inconsistencies?

by Matt
(Mantova, Italy)

I want to show this 2001 white tea study entitled "Potent antimutagenic activity of white tea in comparison with green tea in the Salmonella assay"

The full text version

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi
?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=11448643

First issue: cut leaves and bud are better than uncut leaves and bud?

In the final discussion:

"When white tea was cut to a consistency found in commercially available tea bags, this increased the antimutagenic activity, and HPLC experiments revealed improved overall extraction of the major UV absorbing constituents (not shown). "

Second issue: leaves are better than buds?

In the 3.3 paragraph:

"Finally, because Exotica tea is a ‘cut’ version of a loose leaf variety (Mutant white), we obtained the uncut tea and carefully separated the leaves and buds.

The antimutagenic activity of cut leaf tea was greater than that of cut buds alone, or the mixture of cut leaves and buds (Fig. 7c).

The uncut tea was significantly less effective than the cut variety against IQ (compare the final two bars in Fig. 7c).

Testing of cut and uncut Premium green tea showed only slightly higher antimutagenic activity of the former (data not shown)."

Third issue: white tea processing

After having read your white tea articles I have noticed the erroneous description reported by study authors inherent white tea processing

This is their description

"White tea, which has received little if any attention for its health benefits, represents the least processed of teas in that it goes through steaming and drying without a prior withering stage."

Also you can see fig 1 http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi
?artid=2266698&rendertype=figure&id=F1

Thank you very much for your reply

Matt

Answer:

Thank you for pointing me to the article and I have to say it is a very interesting read.

I venture a few thoughts below, please feel free to disagree.

Issue 1&2:

I don't actually quite understand why the scientists are separating out the leaves and buds.

The difference between high and low grade white tea is not just about buds and leaves.

Although higher grade white tea tends to have more buds than leaves, this is usually a sign of age and timing i.e. first harvests in the season usually yields the highest grade tea, which happens to have more buds than later harvests.

Lower grade white tea such as those used to make teabags is made more of leaves. These are matured leaves, not the tippy leaves associated with higher grade white tea.

The leaves, after they have opened up, can be further classified into slightly unfurled, 1/3 full size, 1/2 full size etc.

It is interesting to note that cut leaves are more potent than the mixture of buds/leaves of similar timing, but to conclude than matured leaves will be more potent than tippy leaves - I can't see the point (unless I am missing something, which is possible).

Buds are not always better than buds. It depends on a lot of factors. For example, Dragon Well green tea is always harvested one-bud-two-leaves or one-bud-one-leaf, and never single buds. I think this study confirms this.

Issue 3:

Such view is very common. They fail to see that traditional white tea is never steamed or heated at high temperature.

The secret lies in the withering - control of temperature, airflows and moisture to allow natural maturation.

It also surprises me that the scientists say white tea chemical composition is "little known", when it is already part of standard Chinese university studies.

If the scientists involved could learn the Chinese language and spend a couple of days reviewing their findings, I think they will save much years and dollars.

On the other hand, I am glad that they concluded that "complete" tea containing the full nutritions are more potent than "artificial" tea containing only the major compounds.

The finding is consistency with other studies I have come across that tea compounds often act in synergy - a fact often ignored by tea supplements marketers.

Those tiny tea compounds that we have not yet understood play a very important part!

I hope this help. And thanks for pointing me to this interesting article.

It is nice to speak to a fellow tea lover!