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 27 tea DHJanzen100266.jpg high resolution
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| Tea (Camellia sinensis, Teaceae) plays almost the same role in (different) societies as does coffee. This is a tea plantation in Uganda (but tea is native to the Southeast Asian tropics). The brown leafless plants in the foreground have been killed in anticipation of removing them for a new generation of tea shrubs. The green plants in the background are in different stages of harvest - the new leaves are hand-picked from the shrubs, and steamed and/or dried in various ways for tea leaves of commerce. And what is in tea? Teine (yes, you are correct, it is yet another alkaloid - along with morphine, caffeine, nicotine, theobromine, cocaine - a small, nitrogen-containing molecule that passes readily through intestinal and cell walls and then interferes with various kinds of cell metabolism). And tannin (see below). So a cup of tea is really a soup of a powerful narcotic drug and a tanning agent. We drink it for the teine - the tannin comes off as flavor, but in fact it is actually tanning our gut and interfering with digestion by binding to the gut wall (the astringent taste in your mouth) and to enzymes in the gut. So now you know why regular tea drinking societies often put milk in their tea - the tannins bind with the milk proteins rendering them non-noxious to your own gut. | ||
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