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A few topics

Greetings, everyone. First time poster but a tea fan for several years now.

First item: Dealing w/green tea and health - my sister went to give blood and they found her iron count to be lower than normal. The first thing they asked her was if she drank green tea on a regular basis. They said that it apparently interferes with iron uptake. Anyone else heard about this?

Second item: Matcha is essentially ground up green tea, right? I can't seem to find it in my area (USA - Virginia). Would grinding up normal loose green tea and then passing it through a fine strainer to get out the veins, stems, and misc. junk create a suitable analogue? Also, about green tea, one of the best I ever had was called Mt. Wen Baojong. It was bulk, and sold by the (now defunct?) Water and Leaves company. Is there a similar tea to this and can I get it in my neck of the woods?

Third item: Alcohol and tea - if the tea is hot enough, wouldn't most of the alcohol vaporize? It's much more volatile than water. Also, just a recommendation - Irish Cream is wonderful in a cuppa. Also, Barenjager is pretty nice, too. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it's a liqueur made mainly from honey and imported from Germany. It's got a bit of a bite though so I use very little when I add it.

Reply to
KeemunBLK
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Yes, I've heard this too.

I like to use an iron tea pot when I can (in the hope that getting extra iron during tea time will help), and I often separate my tea times from my meal times, in the hope that the tannins in the tea won't bind with the iron in my meals that way.

Also, using iron cookware is supposed to help (iron pans, whatever).

Vitamin supplements are probably worthwhile - if she gets one intended for women, it'll likely have more iron than a "generic" one.

Red meat is supposed to have easy to absorb iron. I seem to do fine on my vegetarian diet though (green leafy vegetables tend to have iron, but not as easy to absorb, and some have oxylates, like spinach and the chards, which makes it very hard to absorb). Oh, and having something containing vitamin C at the same time as your iron-containing food is supposed to double iron absorption, and eating dairy products at the same time is supposed to halve it.

Also, if your body is getting low on iron, it tends to realize that and start absorbing more iron on its own. Nice, eh?

Not sure about grinding your own, but you can probably get matcha by mail order.

Reply to
Dan Stromberg

Dan Stromberg wrote: [snip; tea and iron]

There's a good discussion of dietary iron here:

This link talks more about tea and iron, and looks like a pretty good summary of what one finds from digging through PubMed for a few hours:

(Executive summary: if you have iron status problems, avoid tea with or shortly after meals, along with any other steps you take to improve iron status.)

HTH, N.

Reply to
Natarajan Krishnaswami

Keemun: Off course their is Matcha tea in Virginia if you are from northern part of virginia. Teavana.

Ripon Vienna,VA

Reply to
Ripon

give blood and

thing they asked

that it apparently

What she was told is true except that it's black tea, not green tea, that can interfere with iron uptake. This is because of the tannins in black tea - the oxydized, polymerized catechins called theaflavins and thearubigins. From what I have read, the unoxidized catechins in green tea do not have this effect.

Jon

Reply to
Jon Nossen

The tea you're thinking of is a lightly oxidized oolong rather than a green tea, strictly speaking. You'll probably have better luck finding it if you use more common transliterations: Wen Shan rather than Mt. Wen, and Baozhong (or Pouchong) rather than Baojong.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

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