Tea Facts and Quotations

• The first Chinese tea drinkers did not have teapots, but in the 16th century an unknown potter in the Yangtze River town of Yi-Hsing (Yixing) began making stoneware pots that solved the problem of tea leaf clogging.
• Professional tea tasters add milk to a sample tea infusion to observe changes in color and flavor that result from the combination. Many teas are specially grown and manufactured for consumption with milk.
• It was only in 1867 that tea first began to be cultivated on a commercial scale in Sri Lanka (Ceylon) following a coffee blight that wiped out the island's thriving coffee industry.
• Here is a less-often quoted portion of Thomas Garway's famous advertisement for tea, dated 1660: "It is good against crudities, strengthening the weakness of the ventricle or stomach, causing good appetite and digestion, and particularly for men of a corpulent body, and such as are great eaters of flesh."

Tea and Health News

. . . And Thomas Garway may have been right! A recent study in the United States examined the effect of black tea on cholesterol levels in adults with mildly elevated blood cholesterol. Seven men and eight women were given a controlled, weight-maintaining diet for 9 weeks in a blinded, randomized, crossover study. Ingestion of five cups of black tea was compared with a placebo made to look and taste like tea, and that also contained the same amount of caffeine. Compared to the placebo group, those who drank five cups of tea a day decreased their total cholesterol by 6.5% and decreased their LDL cholesterol by 11.1%. So for example, someone with a total cholesterol of 230 would have lowered it, on average, to 215, and an LDL of 165 would be lowered to 147. - J. Nutr., October 1, 2003; 133(10): 3298S-3302S.

Tea and Health News provided by: TheTeaTable.com

Return to current newsletter.   ~   View archived news.