Bottled Tea: Health or Hype?

I saw this in the paper today too. Just one more reason to brew our own!

I thought this was common knowledge?

lifehacker had a link to the press release behind this at:

http://tinyurl.com/2bo6m5w

Do a search on tea while you are at the American Chemical Society http://ACS.org for information about some other interesting tea-related studies such as (green tea & glaucoma) or (chamomile & diabetes), etc.

This is not too a big suprize to me. they use the cheap tea to bottle. The tea supplier I was talking to before I closed kept wanting me to purchase by the ton at $1000 a ton for what he called commercial grade green and black tea.

http://friendii.en.alibaba.com/product/321422430-209342467/5_grade_keemun_black_tea.html

this one is even less 1.28 per kg (2.2 lb)

Lifehacker had a similar article today:

http://lifehacker.com/5620475/a-home+brewed-cup-of-tea-has-20-times-the-healthy-stuff-of-most-bottled-teas

I had never thought of it until recently – people in my family, including me, have never thought of bottled tea as a tea beverage (although it is indeed tea). And this is the bottled tea I usually drink :D
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Tjz7-dt8PhM/S-h6d1bpq5I/AAAAAAAABDQ/v46k1RUDFTQ/s400/%E4%BA%91%E5%8D%97%E7%BA%A2%E7%BB%BF%E6%97%85%E8%A1%8C%E7%93%B6.JPG

I do believe healthy or not is all relative. Bottled tea is by far not as healthy as freshly home brewed tea. But on the other hand, it’s probably much healthier than most other bottled beverage. I would be glad to see more young people drinking low-sugar (hopefully unsweetened) bottled tea rather than sodas and sugar loaded ice drinks of odd greenish, blueish or pinkish color :-p

Another article, this one on Yahoo!
http://health.yahoo.net/experts/drmao/bottled-tea-antioxidants-barely-there

Antioxidants or no, pretty much every bottled tea I have tried tastes like crap.