Some bottled tea beverages may lack the good stuff

If you’re drinking bottled tea beverages in order to reap the benefits of polyphenols in tea, you may be wasting your money. A new study shows that at least some bottled beverages that boast of having tea content actually have paltry levels of polyphenols.

Polyphenols are antioxidants that are thought to promote health by protecting the body’s tissues against oxidative stress and related cell damage that can cause cancer, heart disease and inflammation. A typical cup of brewed black or green tea contains 50 to 150 milligrams of polyphenols.

But the study, presented Monday at the American Chemical Society annual meeting, examined 16-ounce bottled tea beverages for their polyphenol content and found amounts of 81, 43, 40, 13, four and three milligrams in the six samples. The study was conducted by Shiming Li at WellGen, Inc., a New Jersey company that develops natural products that target inflammation.

WellGen would not disclose the names of the beverages sampled. According to an e-mail from its vice president of marketing, however, polyphenol content is not something that is normally included on a beverage label, so it’s hard for consumers to know what they’re getting. “The point of this research is that there needs to be a standard to measuring and reporting on these nutrients if they are important and in demand,” said Patricia Lucas-Schnarre.

-- Shari Roan / Los Angeles Times

Return to Booster Shots blog.