Getting More Out of Tea into You – Nanotechnology

The science is a little deep at first glance on this one but it looks like Chinese scientists are studying using nanotechnology with tea. More specifically they are trying to encapsulate the polyphenols from green tea in order to provide more of them to consumers.

We know that tea and especially green tea, has many health benefits. Some of these come from the polyphenols within tea. Our source says that 30-40% of the polyphenols can be extracted by water whereas black tea only has about 3-10% water-extractable polyphenols. That’s why they are looking hard at green tea.

It looks like they are trying to determine the best encapsulation material to use as their nanoparticles. I don’t know whether this will be a good thing or not. I guess a lot of that depends upon the material used to hold the polyphenols at the end of this research. But I gather what the point is is to provide more health benefits to consumers by delivering more polyphenols than can be achieved from just having a good hot cup of tea.

Source: http://www.nutraingredients.com/Research/Green-tea-catechins-go-nano-study