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Comment by popotamonga | Hacker News Reader

But which tea? There are thousands cant believe they are all the same.

While there are thousands of "herbal teas", just "tea" refers to beverages made with the Camellia sinensis plant. See https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea

There are also lots of different cultivars of that plant and different ways of treating the leaves. Since they all taste different, one would have to assume that the chemical cocktail the brew contains is also markedly different. Whether or not that has an influence on the purported health benefits is unclear.

I suspect the maturity and processing of the leaves have more of an effect than the cultivar.

If this effect is being observed in both coffee and tea, my guesses would be it's either caffeine, something with the roasting, possibly fermentation (but I'm not sure if all tea is fermented), something with fluid consumption, or something with the mental ritual of drinking mild stimulants.

There is a single tea plant, grown in different regions, harvested at different times, and processed in different ways to white, black, green, matcha and pu err tea. I would presume there is no massive difference from the health side as they are largely the same. If in doubt get an organic green tea as green tea best preserves vitamines.

Then there are infusions of fruits, leaves, etc which are not strictly tea.

And there are the above teas with other plants or oils mixed in (e.g. jasmine flower, bergamotte, ...). As long as you don't add much sugar I doubt these have much different impact unless these are plants with known effects of their own (ginseng, ginko, lemongrass, ...).

Going by statistics, I'd arguee black, herbal, and green, with black tea leading with quite a margin. [0]

[0] https://brandongaille.com/20-uk-tea-industry-statistics-and-...

In the UK, perhaps. Much of the world prefers green.

Black tea applies to Europe as a whole as far as I can tell.

Which parts of the world prefer green? Chinese and some Asian restaurants here (Poland) feature green tea quite prominently, but that’s the limit of my experience.

Green tea is predominant in China, Japan and Korea, as well as much of Southeast and Central Asia. Moroccan tea is usually green as well.

Sure, but this study is based on UK data.

Coffee + L-Theanin.

This is the way.

Why?

Tea has more caffeine than coffee but it has l-theanin which calms down its effect, by combining l-theanin (green tea extract) with coffee you can enjoy it without side effects no abnormal heart rhythm, no anxiety-like feelings etc.

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