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[edit] comments

[edit] white tea

Thank you for that end of things. I mainly listed white tea because it clearly does contain catechins (whether or not this is more than green tea), and was not listed. Since it is essentially a form of green tea, I suppose that it could be unnecessary. If some darjeeling teas may have more antioxidants than green or white varieties of tea, it may be worth simpling saying tea rather than give a specific list. My concern was that it was being excluded. While in retrospect your wording on List of antioxidants in food seems to work fine, antioxidant seemed to be implying that catechins were only present in green and black teas, which was bothering me. I've changed both in light of your comments. Thank you for approaching me on the subject. Owen 21:03, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

It was not my original intention to leave "especially green tea", snce this is not proven science. No one has proven that certain teas or herbs or compounds (such as resveratrol) are a single or dominant cause of the observed correlations, and no mechanism has conclusively been shown. As such, for encyclopedic purposes I think the word tea as well as words like wine or berries (instead of statements like red wine, or blueberries, or some other specific thing that is asserted to be "better" but not proven so, just correlated so) are better choices. The problem is that there are a lot of "favored" foods, like white tea specifically, which leverage these claims for economic benefit when no benefit is proven, and in addition are only sourced from specific companies or people and enable natural monopolies based upon an obscured truth. The purpose of an encyclopedia should be to provide enough information to learn more, but not to engage in favoritism. In essence, I would argue that this is a non-NPOV issue. The problem is, there are thousands of these statements over multiple wikipedia pages, and cleaning them all is likely to erupt into edit wars and represents too much work for one person, which is why I am reluctant to take it on. MatthewEHarbowy 23:36, 13 December 2006 (UTC)