Wednesday April 23, 2008 | 4 comments
Looking for healthy ammunition to fight the 3 o’clock blahs, I found myself scrolling through a website that listed ten fresh ways to boost your energy during the day. Being a lover of Top Ten Lists, I was delighted to see the following entry, in position number five:
“Boost your energy with white tea, which has a delicate flavor that requires little sweetening.’Of all the teas, white tea goes through the least processing,’ says Iman Hakim, M.D., Ph.D., a professor at the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health at the University of Arizona in Tucson and a leading researcher on the benefits of tea. As a result, white tea has the highest concentration of L-theanine, an amino acid that, according to recent research, stimulates alpha brain waves to boost alertness while producing a calming effect. And because a cup of white tea contains less caffeine (15 milligrams) than other teas (up to 50 mg) and coffee (120 mg), it’s more hydrating, another key for sustaining energy.”
White tea boosts your energy level, yet contains just a fraction of the caffeine! What could be better than that?
Main Image :: Image 1
Thanks Regena for the nice post and very clear photo of uninfused white tea leaf in the foreground cup. The essence of Dr. Hakim’s report mentioned by CNN is well-taken. The differences amongst the tastes, leaf appearances and actually caffeine contents amongst white teas from different producing origins can be vast. Tea is properly plucked two leaves and a bud from the top of the bush.
It’s the bud alone that we’ve come to call “white tea” aka “pure tips.” The bud is carefully brought by the plucker alone in a silk handkerchief or some similar delicate handling method to the factory where it’s laid out on a table and barely oxidized versus black, oolong or green leaves and quickly packed at the factory up-country, preferably in a vacuum pack in the more advanced tea technology countries, to retain its characteristics.
Even the slightest long-term exposure to air, or breaking of the bud into substantively smaller pieces or shorter lengths than we see in your photo, stands to defeat the unusually wonderful characteristics of white tea to which Hakim refers.
My personal favorite white teas are produced in Japan, Taiwan, India and Sri Lanka. In reality, these pure bud teas can be off-white, light greenish, silver, golden or off-black in visual appearance. When mixed in with black teas or oolong teas or green teas, the attractive appearance of these teas is referred to as tippy tea.
Because of extreme high labor cost of producing pure tip, and what with the quickly escalating per capita GDP growth in most of the tea countries, exports of true pure tip have been dropping sharply by the year over the past quarter century. In the India, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Japan of 2008, the production of pure tips is usually “on demand” from a small handful of global tea connoiseurs who request a few kilos per annum of this most prized of all teas.
Scotia, our photo editor, is responsible for that nice photo, Jo. Thanks for the information on pure tips – I’ve learned a lot, and am delighted to see that the white tea – kishanganj snowbud – I purchased from T Ching looks a lot like that in the picture! I think I’ll have a cup right now. R
Regena,
that CNN article states again that old myth that white tea contains LESS caffeine than more processed teas. But the caffeine content of tea is less dependent on processing than on the leaves that are used. Buds and young leaves have the highest concentrations of caffeine and therefore, teas containing exclusively these parts of the tea plant would be expected to show the highest levels of caffeine.
I think I linked to this study before, but have a look at this site for a listing of caffeine content of various teas. You’ll find that white teas are second only to some green teas in regards to a high caffeine content.
A recent article and discussion on Cha Dao about the caffeine myth might also help to clarify some issues…
Thanks for sharing. I too like “top 10 lists” and was excited to see white tea on the list.