Catechin in tea reduces oxidized LDL, but milk in tea destroys (2026 Update)

Apr 15, 2008 Last reply: 21 hours ago 25 Replies

Dictionaries and other reference books don't have the power to mold the world to conform to the desires of us tea lovers. They have to explain to people working with tannic acid every day such things as its applications, which include, according to Merck 13 (entry #9141):

"Mordant in dyeing; manuf ink; sizing paper and silk; printing fabrics; with gelatin and albumin for manuf of imitation horn and tortoise shell; tanning; clarifying beer or wine; in photography; as coagulant in rubber manuf; manuf gallic acid and pyrogallol; as reagent in analytical chemistry.

"THERAP CAT: Astringent.

"THERAP CAT (VET): Astringent, hemostatic, in solutions for burns. Has been used internally as an astringent and as a heavy metal antidote."

Leather tanning is a trade relegated to the lowly burakumin in Japan (who also handle garbage and corpses) and is banished to districts far downwind from human settlements in the Maghreb. I don't know much about it except that it requires letting the skins of dead animals decay somewhat before treating them with lye and tannic acid, and that it smells very bad.

I doubt there's much tannic acid in tea, especially since the Merck article contains a reference to a study of its toxicity and says in italics, "Keep well closed and protected from light." It also says it's "produced from Turkish or Chinese nutgall." So tea is obviously not the preferred source of it.

(Incidentally, nutrition fans, it occurs in the bark of myrobalan. Doesn't that ring a bell?)

You probably can now... the Nagra III is basically worth nothing these days and you can find a refurb unit for a few hundred bucks. And the thing is, it still sounds damn good.

I did some work for a while with an original Report-L 4000, and I found it could sound pretty good if you are very careful with levels everywhere in the chain. Some of the cuts on the Balticon compilation album were done with the Repoort-L and they don't sound bad at all if I do say so myself.

--scott

...featuring our own Balt?

/Lew

(Off topic: about old high-quality portable tape recorders.)

I recorded ocean waves breaking on the shore at 7-1/2 in/s on my Uher Report Stereo and played them back at 15/16 in/s, and they sounded amazing, like the sound track of a terrifying Hollywood tempest. When I did the same of wine pouring from a jug into a wineglass, it sounded like huge cathedral bells tolling. The room I recorded it in was a rather large living room with a high ceiling, and I suppose the playback made its linear dimensions sound eight times as large, and the frequencies three octaves lower.

I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to record more bird songs, because those I did were incredibly beautiful at low speed.

Billie Holiday in her prime played back at half speed sounds like Louis Armstrong: glorious.

/Lew

Shucks. I've missed a lot, focusing on only sixty subjects at a time.

But at least I saw Louis Armstrong live. It was on the site of the

1939 New York World's Fair, in an open-air theater with the stage on an island. He was a real tape-recorder fanatic!

All we had was an old wire recorder, and when we got rid of it, we threw away all the old home recordings.

Dad (Georgie Price) was one of the first great recording artists, now long forgotten. He was the first non-classical singer to get a long-term contract (5 years) with RCA Victor, after which he went over to Vitaphone. When he was a kid, Enrico Caruso wanted to adopt him, but Gus Edwards did so by offering the family more money -- $15 a week for him plus $15 for them.

(After working for Edwards for more than ten years, it turned out that the money supposedly set aside for him didn't exist, but the money the family got was enough to support all ten of them!)

His theme song was "Bye Bye Blackbird," but I think "Barney Google" actually sold more copies. Back then, almost every record went gold. There were lots of phonograph players, but not many records!

Join the Discussion

Have something to add? Share your thoughts — no account required.

Didn't find your answer?

Ask the community — no account required