Let's get divalent

snip

Know what? "Bouts of subjectivity" is quite wrong. Substitute "unintentional errors." Thanks.

Michael

Woo-Hoo! Back to tea! Thank goodness Michael. I had time to kill before going to the Penguins game last night and stopped by the Strip District (it's where all of the ethnic and asian markets as well as fresh produce are in Pittsburgh) and picked up two boxes of cheap teabags. I bought them because I had never seen or heard of the company "Teck Soon", one was Dragonwell and one was Osmanthus oolong. They are far from quality tea, and I just picked them up because they were brand new and being unpacked by the owner as we talked.

I bought this other red carboard "tin" of tea and the only English on it says "LU PU" I have no idea what the heck it is. Web searches have proved useless so far.

- Dominic Drinking: Just got out of a meeting, still have yet to brew my cheap Dragonwell.

I thought glutamate was classified as a seperate flavor too?

--scott

Which one do you like the best, white or red? I've used it 30 years for everything including fevers. I supply some to my neighbor who is almost invalid from rheumatoid arthritis. She says it provides better pain relief than topical prescription pain medication. You can see a earlier post of my brother running lab tests on himself to monitor his cholesterol levels. I'm not sure of any recent numbers. I'm about ready to send him some Puer. I drink tea for the taste and if it keeps me alive another day to drink some more it didn't cost me anything.

Jim

Dominic T. wrote: ...major whacking...

Hey Dog: It's been a few days since your original post. You must have tried adding Gerolsteiner to your favorite beverage again since then, no? Do we have reproducibility?

/Lew

I've always used Red, simply because it was all that was available. I was a boxer and a hockey player for 12 years, so it has come in handy more times than I can count and in as many ways. I have arthritis in my knee's due to the sport and it helps a bit sometimes there, but not anything major. Fever's, Sinuses, colds, headaches, muscle pain... its all good.

I will search for the Pu-Erh and cholesterol thread, did it work? It seems like it would for a couple real reasons so that is why I figured I'd give it a shot. It can't hurt him, and he gave up cigars years back so some Pu-Erh may just bea soothing thing for him on a couple levels.

I agree with you, if it keeps me alive one day longer, that is just one more cup of tea I get to enjoy.

- Dominic

I used Red during the seventies. In the eighties I discovered White. I think Red is for short term application and White longterm. I now use Red for the body and White for the head. When I'm sick I'll put Red on my feet and belly and White on my face and buttocks. I imagine my white blood cells getting mixed signals and rushing to all compass points at once and cleaning up anything they find on the way. My brother was drinking black tea and from what I remember about the post said he lowered his LDL 13 points. My brother got interested because of the scientific literature about the efficacy of tea lowering cholesterol. In the meantime I sent him white and green tea so I don't know those results if any. I think the specific attributes given to Puer also seem to apply to tea in general. I can say anecdotally that black puer does help with digestion.

Jim

Dom> > Which one do you like the best, white or red? I've used it 30 years

MENSA: Mr. Serebrayakoff, the founder of MENSA was a countryman of mine and harbored many negative elitist attitudes of people who consider IQ as a substitute for knowledge and hard work. After running away from my own country almost 20 years ago I felt the understandable urge to "belong" and having my IQ tested for free at the Church of Scientology in Stockholm (and run away from their recruiters) I understood that this MENSA place may be a good place to meet people who actually know something. Joined MENSA and alas... What a disappointment! After several years of meetings all over CA, NV and even UT and later NY and NJ, I found nothing but a bunch of self-indulgent, mostly lazy, overwhelmingly sloppy and unbelievably snotty crowd that just happened to have some neurons in their brains wired in a peculiar way that allowed them to see questionable patterns in a very specific and completely useless set of exercises. Oh, wow!

Homeopathy - From a point of view of what common people call "common sense" quantum physics makes no sense either. "Common sense" has its areas of application and its gigantic failures as a mental tool. My life and scientific experience proved that never should we mix experiments and theories. Theories are just interesting pastimes. Experiments are the core of science. Most of the medical treatments had ridiculous explanations just before the end of 19th century. But medicine was a very successful discipline despite that since antiquity and did its job pretty well. Jenner invented vaccines having no idea of mechanisms of immune response and was ridiculed for years for attempts to make a hybrid between people and cows for years by people who used arguments very similar to yours. I do not give a damn about homeopathic theories. I do not give a damn if they are capable of understanding the causes and effects of their treatments as long as the treatments themselves show results and I saw that. I have very little interest in so-called "peer reviews" that usually used to validate science because I saw so often how "peers" jump out of their pants to prevent concurrent theories to see the light of day. One of the best examples are these two guys, Marshall and Warren who got their Nobel Prize recently for proving that stomach ulcers is a bacterial disease and can be cured in HOURS! For more than 20 years they were called quacks, their work pushed aside and their results questioned because they attempted to take away hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars from gastroenterologists. I know some of these real quacks who even now resist the truth. Reading about their tribulations and how their work "did not make sense" in the eyes of gastroenterologists is a scary reading that is the best explanation I know why we still have no serious breakthroughs in cancer treatments. Peptic ulcers is just some hundreds of millions of $$, cancer is tens of billions of dollars that can be potentially taken away from cancer surgeons! So before you or my good friends Lew and Michael Plant express their views on homeopathy so cocky and easily, I suggest you exercise a little caution. All you do is to pre-judge something that may as well save your life one day as it did for countless patients. I knew a guy, who is a gastroenterologist himself and despite years of our mutual friend trying to convince him to try antibiotics on his own wife who had peptic ulcers, he, using 'common sense" dismissed the whole thing and her ulcers turned cancerous and she died. His words were "What do two crazy Aussies know about ulcers that I do not know?" Apparently a freaking lot.

Sasha.

"Dominic T." wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...

(3155

Yeah, actually one webpage I looked at had the old "four tastes" and one had the more recent-to-the-West five tastes with umami added. One of those pages I mentioned also had info about the specific molecules that trigger 'sour" and "bitter" etc., which I found very interesting.

Is MSG still considered an evil substance to add to food? I'd seek some out to add to my food as an experiment but I seem to recall that it was or is considered bad for the health.

Melinda

Perhaps not by scientific standards, but I've tried the trick on four oolongs of very different character, through multiple steeps, and it seems to work similarly. Least effect was on a Hairy Crab that actually brews up OK in the overly pure local water for some reason.

I'm almost out of Gerolsteiner and don't like it much anyways. Next step is to try pure calcium and magnesium salts, and a few other mineral waters.

Current theory on the persistent effect: maybe instead of something fancy like cortical reset or charging tasting tissues with excess ions, it's just solutes leaking out from nooks and crannies in the mouth. Anyone else here get repeats on tasty teas hours after drinking? I'm guessing that that's why.

-DM

Oh yeah, for the nerds and general disputants: I find useful the distinction between flavor addition and flavor potentiation. The potentiator may have taste of its own, like salt, sugar, or MSG; but its effect on the mix will be out of proportion to its intrinsic taste. Things like miracle berry or artichokes+milk are extreme examples.

[Sasha] [More Sasha] [Michael] OK, I Michael the Cocky here. Guilty as charged. I admit: 1) I've never read studies on the efficacy of homeopathy. 2) I've heard from possibly reliable sources that well designed and executed studies exist showing that the homeopathic effect surpasses the placibo effect. 3) I get high marks for glibness and do occasionally well with sarcasm. I also score high on lazy and sloppy. Happily, these qualities will never compromise the good name of MENSA since I have nothing but my wits to put on the table. I suffer from mediocrity.

Nicely written and heart felt, Sasha. I enjoyed your post above, and I get it.

Michael

Certain persons seem to be allergic. If that was your case, you'd already know it, you wouldn't be able to eat 90% of prepared food.

I find artificial MSG has a bad aftertaste while natural umami is very good. It is like the difference between the sweeteness of aspartame and that of honey.

Kuri

I have no idea what it is worth scientifically, but that might be the same sort of mechanism. Look at the video about salt in coffee on this page :

tato%20skin%252

They have coffee forgotten 6 hours on the machine, it is considered too acid. They had a very small amount of salt and the acidity seems to disappear. They say there is not enough salt to feel its taste. The explanation given by the coffee specialist is there are acid elements in the brewed coffee, they are small just after brew the coffee and grow up in size (so acidity can be felt). Then if you add salt, the natrium contained in the salt bounces into the enlarged element and they go back to initial size (and coffee goes back initial taste).

That reminds me that I add honey to dry products to make them taste younger. For instance rice of last year's crop tastes closer to newer rice. Rehydrated dried mushrooms taste closer to fresh ones. I don't remember where I saw the explanation.

Kuri

Always happy to be helpful to my friends.

Sasha.

OJ,

As to the "So it is nit AFET, APRE, POST adding" it was meant to be "So it is not AFTER, APRE, POST type of adding" - I was talking about adding the salt to tomato. How the above quote got corrupted - I have no idea. Drinking - definitely not, despite the fact that I came from the shores where this pastime can only be called THE expression of national soul.

Cheers,

Sasha.

Kuri -

The cases I know of, did not look like simple allergies. Mostly the individuals would be having MSG food with no problems occasionally. However when they started to eat MSG food more often (in one case it was a guy who was in a lengthy business trip living next to a Chinese restorant and instead of having chinese once a week, he was eating there every day) - then they experienced quite heavy negative (I am trying to avoid the word "toxic" here) effects. In case of classic allergies, as you correctly stated, the picture would be quite different.

BTW - unfortunately the signs "NO MSG" that you can see on the doors of most Chinese restorants now do not necceserily reflect the true situation. Legally, "MSG" abbreviation does not mean "Monosoidium glutamate" and such a sign can be misguiding..

Sasha.

Kuri -

A very interesting case! But the important thing to keep in mind here is this - Tea is closer to what is called true solution , while coffee is more a colloid (where tiny particles of solids (or other non-mixing liquids) are suspended in a "mother" liquid. From the point of view of chemistry and even physics these are two different worlds. What you decsribed in your post is a very possible effect in colloids and quite impossible in normal circumstances in true solutions.

Sasha.

You can argue that umami changes other flavours that come along with it. But then again, saltiness and sweetness also change other flavours that come along. That's what makes cooking interesting.

Some people seem to have very bad reactions to it. Growing up in Hawaii as a kid, I used to see little old ladies carrying ten-pound bags of the stuff home from the grocery. If it was all _that_ bad for you, most of Asia would be dead by now.

I can still sing the ajinomoto commercial jingle, too.

--scott

Before doing anything else, try making a cup with deionized water. It has a very different flavour to it than tea made with tap water around here.... really quite boring and almost flat. But get a sense of what it tastes like.

Right, exactly. Salts do this quite a lot, but I don't have a modern citation for the phenomenon, or any proposal for a good mechanism. I am satisfied to sit back and enjoy it.

--scott