Tea and Fasting
Can I have tea while I’m fasting?
This post covers black tea, green tea, oolong tea, and white tea (No white tea does not mean it contains milk. White tea is merely young black tea picked before maturity.) There was too much research to cover to be able to do herbal teas, which I’ll let you know right now are worse.
Non-herbal teas
But tea is okay during a fast right? Of course, but don’t call it a fast. Tea is chock full of polyphenols. But those are awesome, right? Yup and they elicit a response from the body to assimilate the tea.
ERGO, when you drink tea during a fast you are requiring the body to work on something other than burning fat.
We all know that a multitasker cannot give 100% of themselves to any one project whilst doing many. It’s a categoric impossibility.
I am not suggesting that the body is unitasking at burning fat, what I am suggesting is to ask yourself a question, “why give the body more work?”
One study here suggests “gastrointestinal digestion.” The first two words in the paragraph tell us that tea in and of itself elicits a digestive response.
Further, we look at the salivary phase, bioavailability, antioxidants, gastric sensitivity, Catechins are not absorbed and accumulate in the intestinal lumen and inhibit cellular glucose and cholesterol uptake.
They are found to be significantly bound to plasma HDLs, suggesting a major role in cholesterol metabolism. Keyword metabolism.
BUT WAIT. Those are good things, right? Yup. But… you’re supposed to be fasting.
When you’re fasting with water your body merely needs to worry about everything that is going on in your body without food and what is going on in your body with water.
If you add tea to the mix you’re giving the body just one more thing to worry about. And, like coffee, the bitter receptors elicit a digestive response.
Further, testing shows a very low intestinal bio-accessibility and bioavailability related to a neutral intestinal pH. Now, interestingly enough, the above big biowords increased when yeast was introduced to the intestine.
What this is saying is that the good stuff we get from tea requires more than just the tea to be there.
Caffeine in coffee and tea not only block adenosine receptors, can elicit reflex autonomic responses, but elicit the cephalic phase digestive responses dumping gastrin, a digestive hormone into the stomach.
Now for the mic drop moment and I probably could have just put this small paragraph and left it at that.
Go to all those websites that tell you that drinking tea whilst fasting is not only okay but it’s better for you–enhances your fast–and copy and paste this PubMed study
Black, green, and oolong teas are all shown to increase insulin activity. BOOM. But that’s a good thing right? Yep when you have food in your body. When you’re fasting insulin is the enemy, because when there’s insulin in the bloodstream stream what are we not burning? Did you guess fat? Well, I’m not a mind reader. And for those of you that don’t think that I was cheeky enough in this post. Sod off.
References
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12428980
https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/artic…/pii/S221342201300098X
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25236233
https://www.sciencedirect.com/…/…/abs/pii/S175646461500242X…