Have you switched from coffee or soft drinks to herbal tea this year? Then quickly check the ingredients list, because not every herbal drink is equally healthy for your body.
‘Functional drinks’, including herbal teas, have never been so popular. Since the Covid-19 pandemic, they have been on the rise and the Tea & Coffee Trade Journal predicts that sales figures will increase by 9% this year. In some cases there is nothing wrong with this, on the contrary, but research by the Daily Mail shows that not all producers take the health of their customers equally seriously.
Unhealthy additives
The term herbal tea is vague. The combinations are almost endless, but the flavors of such a classic herbal drink are not always very pronounced. To make the drinks more attractive to their customers, many brands add ‘extras’ to their recipes. These extra ingredients range from dried fruit to sugar flakes to citric acid and E numbers. One of the herbal drinks the journalists examined even contained four spoons of sugar per cup.
“Drinking sweetened tea means bathing your mouth in a dissolved sugar mix, which allows the sugar to penetrate every crevice of your mouth and teeth,” said Sam Jethwa, a British dentist from Marlow, in an interview with the Daily Mail.
And although hot sweetened drinks are no more harmful than cold ones, we often drink hot drinks at a slower pace, causing the sugar solution to remain in the mouth longer. Bad for your teeth, your figure and your general health. There is nothing wrong with herbal tea itself, but be sure to check the ingredients list.
