Green Tea with Milk, Sugar and Honey?

Green tea is pure or with additions of equally healthy? Milk, sugar, sweeteners and honey inhibit the major polyphenols / catechins in green tea, vitamin C may even improve the bioavailability.

Drink pure green tea

In the 7th Century AD writes the "father of green tea" Lu Yu in the first book about the history of the Cha Ching green tea that green tea without additions (honey, flavors, etc.) should always be drunk pure. This had not only aesthetic or taste reasons, but was the health effect due. And so it is mostly held today in China and Japan.

It is questionable why a green tea should be at all, mixed with ingredients such as lemon, sugar, honey or milk. If the goal is to be the flavor improvement, then the connoisseurs of high-quality green tea, theproperly prepared and was pulled with the right water, its little excited. Such tea tastes neither too bitter nor too "thin" to him and also has no fishy taste to some rumored. On the contrary, he has a variety of extremely fine and rich flavors, so that he would lose with every ingredient to its high quality and depth. That being said, it is important to understand the interactions of possible additions to the active ingredients of green tea, and to understand that he only unfolds its full effect on health in pure form. 

Milk in green tea

By the addition of milk in green tea is clearly inadvisable. The same goes for drinking milk or eating dairy products in the near time interval to the green tea. Caseins in milk decrease the concentration of catechins as major (EC, EGC, ECG, EGCG) in the prepared tea water. This was also supported by a study by cardiologists of the Berlin Charité (Prof. Verena Stangl) in 2006 found that was published in the European Heart Journal (2007, 28, pp. 219-223): "In the present study, we found a Particular, selective decrease in the Concentrations of a number of catechins after Centrifugation of freshly brewed tea with milk Compared with tea without milk, Which Suggests complex formation between catechins and milk proteins ".

It is therefore in my view recommended milk at least 10-20 minutes before and after omitting the enjoyment of tea.

Sugar, honey and sweet substances in green tea

On the harmful effects of sugar, but also of sweeteners in the diet has been reported much in the literature (metabolism, intestinal mucosa, immune system, tooth decay). For this reason alone, the addition of sweet substances in green tea is not recommended. But more importantly, there is the problem that, according to my kinesiology testing, sugar and sweeteners, including honey, the effect of polyphenols in green tea significantly reduced and in some cases even completely cancels. Green tea should therefore always be drunk without such additions.