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Tea, especially green tea, does interfere with drugs, due to catechins. Anyway, the only interactions recognized by the occidental medicine so far are two: green tea reduces the absorption of beta-blockers (especially nadolol by as much as 76%), drugs used to treat cardiovascular diseases as hypertension, myocardial infarction and heart failure. The second interaction is with bortezomib, an anticancer drug, which also is reduced in effect when given with green tea. With these drugs, tea intake is forbidden.
There could be other drug-interactions, as cathechins are known to bind to many molecules, thus blocking (or delaying) their absorption by the gastrointestinal tract, but they are still not scientifically proven. For that reason, when taking drugs other than those mentioned above, it is a good rule to let the drug be absorbed before taking tea. If you just had tea, instead, you should let the gastrointestinal tract have another meal before taking your medicine. Alternatively, a large amount of water could wash out the stomach from catechins and let the drug be absorbed without coming in contact with them.
There are also other interactions due to caffeine, but not regarding the absorption of drugs: it is due to its excitatory effect on the central nervous system, and this could interfere with those drugs which aim to depress it (as sedatives, sleep aids, etc). In this case, we see a decrease in effectiveness of these drugs, as it is easy to imagine.
Statins found in shu cha pu-er are too few to account for toxicities as muscle damage, if 50ug (micrograms)/gram of dry leaves is the correct value. At least few milligrams of the most potent synthetic statin is needed to have a minimum effect. Considering that natural statins are far less potent than synthetic ones (i.e. more potent = less drug needed to achive the desirable effect), it is not possible to experience side effects from a normal daily use of shu cha, but this means that also the desired effect (cholesterol lowering) is quite improbable to be achieved with shu cha. Nobody has done some deep research on that up to now! Maybe shucha is really effective in lowering blood cholesterol but because of a different reason respect to its statins content. For example, it could be that shu cha taken after meals sequesters food cholesterol from being absorbed by the gut. Or maybe it is a matter of the continous and consistent daily use of shu cha that makes those statins accumulate into the body. We don’t know! I hope some research will be done on this topic. Until that moment, we should base our observations on what people experience from tea drinking: muscle pain associated with shu cha has never been reported!
If you find the leaves are “overcooked” with the lid on, maybe the water temperature is too high or the infusion time too long. You should work on these two parameters instead of the lid setting: the lid off let the tea cool down too fast and some aroma to be wasted. Traditionally, the gong fu approach requires the lid to be on the gaiwan during the infusion, otherwise you are infusing your tealeaves in an occasional way as you would do with a mug and less demanding tea. The gong fu approach requires more attention.
Bouquet style TGY (this should be the tea you drunk) has a strong cooling nature in TCM terms and you probably got tea drunk! It is always advisable to eat something rich in sugars after a gong-fu round of such teas or even in between to prevent it. I think McDonald food is generally richer in fats respect to sugars (unless you ate McDonald icecream or drunk a coke) so this could be the reason why it didn’t work.
Anyway, the headache is also a common condition after a sleepless night. If you do not normally use to drink so much tea, your night could be not very restful so that your headache didn’t benefit of a refreshing sleep.
I hope you will resume soon 🙂
It is difficult to analyze such a case with such a brief description, and even difficult to say that tea is the cause even if it seems to be so. Could you please specify if it was a green or browned Tie Guan Yin, how did you brewed it and how much did you drink it? Did you have headache soon after drinking that tea or much later on? And for how long? Have you eaten something after having tea? Finally, do you normally suffer from headache? If so, in which conditions?
@ Leo, Thank you for your elucidation! I always had Longjing from West Lake (at least they declared that) but now I would like to taste some from those provinces you talked about. I’ll start my hunting 🙂
Thank you very much! This topic is very interesting!
Tea sellers in Europe do not know much details about the tea they sell. Especially the specific garden from which it comes from. I would like to know more about each garden of Long Jing in Zhejiang! Which are the most popular and in what they differ?
Yes. As I’ve written before, changing the starting material also changes the chemical composition of the final product, as more or less sugars, different qualieties of sugars… And the same applies on polyphenols. Food post-treatment is even much more important if you want to assess differences among apparently similar foods. So, consider the maturing process (dried fruits are intended to be conserved, not consumed fresh, and they change) or addition of other substances (flavors, sweeteners, preservatives, etc.)
Actually the discussion becomes very complex if we try to investigate on the taste of foods and its relation with food processing. I’m not going into details here, but I just want to say that in the case of dried fruit, polysaccarides (especially pectins in fruit) form a kind of mesh in which other substances get trapped. This acts as a mask for some flavors or simply makes those flavors to dissolve slower and differently among them, in a way that we can sense them in different instants during tasting, thus intriguing even more the complexity of that food.
Raisins are made using a particular kind of grape, richer in sugars and without seeds. It is like selecting a cultivar of tea plants. They are two different products 🙂
Also consider that a dryed fruit is more concentrated in substances and that they are in a solid form. In fresh fruits, substances are just dissolved in water. This makes a big difference when you put these foods on your tongue: solid ones stick physically in your mounth and it takes more time to be solubilized and swallowed. The persistance in this case can be given by any substance, and I think the different experience you had with dried and fresh fruits is more concerning sugars instead of polyphenols. If you try to swallow sugar in crystals and sugar just dissolved in water, for sure you would feel the difference in terms of persistance and its intensity.
It does not depend on the content of water in the food: the fruit is dried to slow down its natural process of degradation, but the content of nutrients and polyphenols is hardly altered during drying. What matters is the quality and the quantity of polyphenols among different fruits. As example, unripe fruits is rich in tannins, a subclass of polyphenols that has the greatest ability to make proteins to precipitate. Then, during ripening, tannins are degraded and that fruit becomes more sweet and less astringent. In fact, ripe and mellow fruit is more compatible with tea. Anyway, comparing two ripened fruits on their capacity to hide the texture of a tea is still possible because of their different qualities and mixtures of polyphenols contained.
