Milk Tea
For kicks I started drinking milk tea. This summer, I’ve been pondering the phenomenon of people’s adverse gastric responses to tea. It boils down to the anti-nutrients in plants, a misfortune calling into question the vaunted benefits of polyphenols, catechins, and tannins. Not the least of these anti-nutrients is oxalates. Oxalate receives great attention among those who’ve suffered from kidney stones. Kidney and gallstones are anecdotally becoming more common given the popularity of certain nondairy and nongluten alternatives that are chock full of oxalates. Here’s some data that makes some preliminary forays into this matter.
Food is quite personal. People don’t like to have their style cramped. The matter becomes even touchier when challenging conventional wisdom. Afterall, knowing what we know because that’s what we’ve been told should be sufficient especially when the majority of experts are in agreement. I mean if you cannot trust experts, then whom can you trust? If plants aren’t our friends, then how ever shall we reduce our carbon footprint and save the unquestionably globular oblate spheroid from the unrepentant binarians?
Curiously, I recently had a run in with a friend on this matter of oxalates. He relayed an uncommon situation in the dental office involving bony growths, a phenomenon perhaps replicating something with his knee since a teenager. Friend eats very generous amounts of high oxalate food: spinach, almonds, chard etc. His favs. We could chalk his predicament up to something genetic. I don’t see why not, but that seems like only part of the equation. The stones formed in the kidney are no different from the phenomenon of pseudo-gout (bone formations from oxalates as opposed to uric acid) or some forms of arthritis. We shouldn’t rush to conclusions, but we can also exercise a modicum of reason based upon dietary habits.
Much of the scientific data surrounding the benefits of plants are based on unproven assumptions. The vast majority of positive plant research findings are on rats. Ethical standards, time, and costs primarily limit studies to rats. Though rats are mammals, their natural diets and metabolism are not entirely analogous to humans. Therefore, it requires a leap of faith to conclude that rat studies translate to humans. What we really need is more dolphin, monkey, and volunteer prisoner studies preemptively declared safe-and-effective by dint that the very trustworthiness of science depends upon it.
Suppose, for argument’s sake, we grant that findings in rats can be applied to humans. Does that mean that the unstated assumptions surrounding such findings have a leg to stand on? By way of example, founder of the PCR test for which he won the Nobel Prize Kerry Mullis relays in his book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field an incident involving a speaking engagement on behalf of a very prominent pharmaceutical company (a safe-and effective pharmaceutical outfit I might add) for an anti-viral medication they were promoting. Mullis asked said company for the research data proving that a certain virus was the cause of said condition. No research was forthcoming. To this day no such research exists, but evidence (or the lack thereof) is meaningless in the face of conventional wisdom, not to be confused with relentless marketing and psychological terror campaigns. Only the non-democratic types stoop so low.
Good ole conventional wisdom is not permanently etched in stone. That’s what we call scientific progress. Many clinicians, surgeons, and researchers are beginning to chip away at the conventional wisdom surrounding cholesterol, for example. This is quite interesting because it potentially pulls the proverbial rug from under all of the supposed plant benefits. In short, even if olive oil, green tea, and acai lower cholesterol, it doesn’t mean that low cholesterol is a good thing. Most working assumptions around the purported benefits of plant molecules are largely based upon epidemiological studies biased by policy directives. Epidemiological studies are interesting but they do not constitute proof; they are not controlled and can only serve as basis for conjecture. For example, if we take data surrounding Japanese tea consumption, we may attribute it to why Japanese live as long as they do or to their significantly higher stomach cancer rates. The outcomes may be due to their eating lots of fish or maybe general affluence. There is no way of knowing without controls.
With this knowledge about anti-nutrients in tow, perhaps we can gain fresh perspectives on some of the thinking behind the processing of tea in general or why those in HK consider young raw (traditionally processed) puerh poison. Traditional food preparation methods and combinations no doubt play some part in mollifying the effects of anti-nutrients, though traditional rationales are not likely to express such practices in terms of anti-nutrients. Bean soaking, for instance, demonstrably catabolizes phytates and lectins. However, soaking has negligible effect upon reducing oxalate. Aging is known to have a catabolizing effect upon tannins, phytates, catechins and other polyphenols. Alas, the same cannot be said for oxalates.
Maybe the whole issue is much ado about nothing, but if it were nothing then the phenomenon precipitating this query would be too rare to have sparked interest in the first place. Still, more research is needed. Reducing emergent (emergent in the sense that the sensitivity develops after a few years) tea intolerance solely to oxalates may prove lacking in necessary nuance. With nutrition and human physiology, this is most often the case. Most of the data surrounding oxalates involves kidney stones. However, the issue is by no means confined just to kidney stones. Anyway, this oxalate issue in addition to awareness of the Silk Road pastoralists’ fancy for milk tea is what spurred me into making my own. I’ll share more on my own brew later.
