Scientists have discovered about 500 previously unknown compounds in brewed tea

Tea is the second most popular drink in the world, second only to ordinary water. It has been drunk for more than one thousand years, and scientists have studied everything so thoroughly that it would seem that there are no secrets left in tea, but at the same time missing a very important component of the water itself.

As recent laboratory studies have shown, there are about 500 compounds in brewed tea, which are quite capable of reacting with chlorine, forming new previously unknown compounds.

Common tea and unusual compounds

In the overwhelming majority of cases, when brewing tea, we use ordinary tap water. So, no matter how well our filters work, chlorine still remains in boiled water, which is used for its disinfecting work.

And, as it turned out, these chlorine residues are quite capable of participating in chemical reactions with tea compounds, resulting in the formation of disinfection by-products (SPD).

An international team of scientists, consisting of representatives from the University of South Carolina (USA) and Tianjin University (China), have already measured 60 known PPDs and found out that their content in already prepared tea is much lower when compared with the data obtained from the analysis of ordinary tap water water.

Scientists explained this unexpected result by the fact that some of the compounds during brewing either evaporated or were absorbed by the leaves of the brewed tea.

But by performing further analysis, the researchers also identified a large number of previously unknown BPDs. What effect these compounds have on human health remains to be seen.

So the researchers, using the method of gas chromatography, high-resolution mass spectrometry, identified 15 compounds, which, according to the authors of the work hypothesized that they were obtained in the course of the interaction of chlorine with natural phenolic and also polyphenol precursors in tea leaves.

In addition, the scientists found that the total mass of organic halogens in the PPD was approximately twice that in tap water. And of the entire array of detected PPDs, it was possible to identify only 4%, and the remaining 96 (and this is about 500 types) did not studied, but, despite this fact, according to the researchers, all of them do not pose a serious threat to health person.

In order to overcome the dangerous level of concentration of these substances, you need to drink about 50 cups of tea in one day.

Well, it turns out that even simple tea carries a lot of surprises. We will wait for the next discoveries of scientists. Well, if you liked this material, then rate it and do not forget to subscribe to the channel. Thank you for the attention!