Research Shows Adding Lemon Juice To Green Tea Gives Added Benefits
During my research for my many green tea posts in the Learning Centre, I came across an article about the complementary benefits of adding citrus juice — or more specifically, vitamin C — to green tea.
Green tea, or Camellia sinensis, seems to exert many of its good effects through catechins. These are flavonoids, flavan-3-ol, to be exact.
Catechins are secondary metabolites and they provide significant antioxidant activity. Polyphenols, of which flavonoids are a group, are derived from plant sources.
Catechin, epicatechin, flavonoid, C15H14O6 molecule. It is flavanol, a type of natural phenol and antioxidant. Skeletal chemical formula. Vector Illustration
The research on the green tea-citrus link was conducted by Mario Ferruzzi, PhD, a renowned food and nutrition researcher who was affiliated with Purdue University at the time. I found a lot of interesting articles by Ferruzzi, so you will be seeing more references to his work in my own future articles.
The results of this particular study were released in 2007, but I haven’t found any recent articles that would contradict these findings.
Vitamin C is ascorbic acid. The addition of this acid to green tea helps create/maintain an acidic environment that helps preserve the catechin activity through the digestive process. The more catechins available, the more possibilities for their powerful antioxidant benefits.
Lemon juice appeared to be the most effective, followed by orange, lime and then grapefruit juice.
So squeeze a few drops of lemon juice into your green tea, or any tea for that matter.
I recommend buying actual lemons and using them, not something processed, to derive even more benefits from an already healthy habit.