Known for its antioxidant properties and its richness in polyphenols which help slow down the aging of cells, tea would have another more surprising beneficial effect: that of inactivating Sars-CoV-2, a virus from the coronavirus family.
Since Covid-19 disrupted our daily lives in 2020, a host of grandmother's tips have been brandished, each in turn, as easy and often natural solutions to protect yourself from the virus. An avalanche of remedies and advice then swept across social networks. We could read that you should drink hot water, or take a very hot bath, otherwise expose yourself to the sun in order to kill the virus. The scale of these false recommendations was such that Unicef had to speak out to put an end to the misinformation about these so-called antidotes against Covid-19.
However, four years after the start of the pandemic, one of the remedies that had been cited is making a comeback, and is presented by an American researcher as a way to protect yourself from Sars-CoV-2. It's about tea. But, contrary to the false claims made in 2020, it is not at all because it is a hot drink that the infusion could be a way to fight the virus. And we're not talking about all teas either. Only five varieties have been identified by Malak Esseili, a virologist at the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, as potentially inactivating Sars-CoV-2. These are black tea, eucalyptus mint, mint blend, raspberry zinger tea and green tea.
Published in the journal Food and Environmental Virology, this research suggests that the virus can be inactivated in saliva. “Inactivation of SARS-CoV-2 in the mouth and throat is important because it potentially reduces the introduction of the virus into the lower respiratory system“, explains the scientist in a press release. In total, 24 types of tea were screened to verify the effectiveness of this potential solution. The experiments consisted of both the consumption of a cup of tea and gargling In this second case, the tea infusion was deliberately concentrated four times more strongly than the drink, a detail which is not really a detail since in ten seconds of gargling, the five varieties of tea reduced the virus. 'at 99.9% This good result was also obtained when drinking black tea. For the other four teas, the virus was reduced by at least 96% after the drinks remained in it for at least ten seconds. the mouth. Note that all the preparations did not contain milk, sugar or even lemon.
However, tea should not be considered as a medicine against the coronavirus. The American researcher clearly specifies that “At this point, we do not suggest tea as a stand-alone intervention against SARS-CoV-2, as the virus also replicates in the nose and may have already reached the lungs by the time a person tests positive” (…) But tea may provide an additional level of intervention that patients and their families can easily adopt as a routine“.
Slide: The 10 benefits of tea
