Health benefits of Coffee and Tea compared – By Dr Harold Gunatillake
Written by Dr Harold Gunatillake OAM -Health writer
Drinking Tea or coffee as a beverage is a personal choice, but health benefits favor coffee.
Both beverages have caffeine. Tea leaves have more caffeine than coffee beans before they are brewed, but the caffeine in tea is extracted more during brewing within ten seconds and further diluted more when adding hot water. Also, most of the caffeine is left behind with the tea leaves at the base of your cup. For these reasons, brewed tea you enjoy has less caffeine than brewed coffee.
Both tea and coffee in excess can increase anxiety, rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, insomnia, restlessness and nausea in hypersensitive people. Tea and coffee have protective antioxidants to neutralise free radicals in your body; coffee is a better source of antioxidants. Tea has catechins and theaflavins, while coffee has chlorogenic acids and trigonelline, the primary antioxidants. Most habitual coffee drinkers get more antioxidants from drinking coffee than from other dietetic sources.
Black tea, oolong tea and green tea may not have many antioxidants as coffee is These antioxidants in coffee and tea don’t spend much time in the body to play a significant role in antioxidant defences because they are not absorbed through the gut. When drunk, they do not stay in the body long. One advantage to tea drinkers is that they drink more tea during the day than coffee drinkers, which may get more antioxidants. If you don’t get side effects, the recommended
amount of coffee is two daily. Antioxidants in tea and coffee are proven to reduce the risk of certain cancers, heart disease and other age-related diseases. Most people drink a cup of strong coffee in the morning to relieve their sleep and make them more active and muscles work. Tea drinkers are few because the first-morning cup does not have the same stimulant effect as coffee. Studies at Stanford University say a cup of coffee a day could keep early death away.
Antioxidants in coffee have more effect on age-related inflammation, like noncommunicable diseases of ageing and may have fewer diseases and may prolong life.
It is known that caffeine in coffee intake is associated with longevity, unlike tea drinkers. Estate tea pluckers in Sri Lanka don’t seem to live long, and drinking many cups of tea leads to iron deficiency. Tannins in the tea can combine with nonheme iron, making it less available for absorption.
It is noted that black tea and green tea decrease iron absorption, and putting lemon juice in the tea helps absorb the iron. Coffee drinkers may also decrease iron absorption, but not to that extent as tea consumption.
The body manufactures metabolites which are waste by-products produced within your cells. Coffee seems to block those metabolites circulating in your body. The waste metabolites believed to trigger inflammation are known to drive diseases like Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular diseases. People having Alzheimer’s are given plenty of coffee to stimulate the brain cells, which keeps them more active.
So, caffeine in your coffee slows down the ageing process. Two cups of coffee a day halves your chances of liver damage, as in fatty liver and cirrhosis. Coffee may undo liver damage from alcohol. Coffee drinkers seem to have less incidence of diabetes, and those who have diabetes may increase insulin sensitivity. In conclusion- drink more coffee than tea. In the Western world, people drink more coffee and seem more active in life.
It was fashionable for the old ladies to customarily get together for high tea in the UK and to sip Lipton’s tea whilst engaged in chit-chats. The UK seems to be the highest tea drinker in the world, and then comes the Middle East countries. People in the US seem to drink more coffee than tea. Caffeine is a drug that is very similar in action to theophylline, a bronchodilator drug. It is given to asthmatics to open the airways and relieve the wheezing, coughing and breathlessness in asthma. Caffeine, found in coffee and tea, can act as a bronchodilator.
In 1993, Dr Scott T. Weis of Harvard Medical School studied 20,000 asthma patients and found that those who regularly drank coffee suffered onethird fewer symptoms than those who did not drink. So, it is recommended
that people with asthma drink coffee daily to help relieve some of them, but medication may still be required.
Tea also contains natural theophylline, but the amount is much less than used to treat asthma.
Whether you drink tea or coffee, be mindful, think that you are drinking for your health, and feel the difference.
I hope this article was helpful.
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