Tea has a lot of chemicals that are beneficial to us humans. Unfortunately, the process of decaffeinating the tea also removes a lot of those chemicals so although you do not get the jitters, you do not get the health benefits when drinking decaffeinated tea.
Which brings us to this interesting paper at the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry:
Hongyacha, a Naturally Caffeine-Free Tea Plant from Fujian, China
Hongyacha (HYC) is a type of new wild tea plant discovered in Fujian Province, China. This tea is helpful to the healing or prevention of disease in its original growing area. However, research on this tea is limited. Our results showed that HYC displayed obvious differences in its morphological characteristics compared with Cocoa tea (Camellia ptilophylla Chang), a famous caffeine-free tea plant in China. Theobromine and trans-catechins, but not caffeine and cis-catechins, were the dominant purine alkaloids and catechins detected in HYC. HYC might contain abundant gallocatechin-(4 → 8)-gallocatechin gallate, 1,3,4,6-tetra-O-galloyl-β-d-glucopyranose, and (−)-gallocatechin-3,5-di-O-gallate, which were not detected in regular tea. We also found that the TCS1 of HYC was distinct, and the responding recombinant protein exhibited only theobromine synthase activity. The obtained results showed that HYC is a new kind of caffeine-free tea plant and may be used for scientific protection and efficient utilization in the future.
And I bet that they are working on sequencing the genome, finding what makes it caffeine free and doing a bit of CRISPR with conventional tea plants.
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