User talk:MatthewEHarbowy/Archive2007

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1 white tea
2 Catechins
3 Tannins
4 Health benefits of tea
5 WP meetup

[edit] white tea

White tea is a distinct type of tea because of its unique processing: withering and drying. Only very few tea plants can be made as white tea, such as the widely quoted da bai.

The withering process is especially crucial, as it has to allow for chemical reations of making tea while allowing just a small amount of polyphenol to oxidise.

White tea does contain higher amount of catechins simply because it tends to be made of younger tea shoots. But the process itself actually reduces the catechins content, as a Chinese study has shown.

Juliantai 14:47, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

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)

[edit] Catechins

Good job and thanks for leaving me a note. I think there are still certain things to correct.

Should include Gallocatechin in the title of the section so that we have four catechins (C, GC, EC, EGC) --(done)
Correct gallate abbreviations of catechins with small g, e.g. Cg, GCg, ECg, EGCg. --(disagree: gallate esters don't need the case dropped for clarity, although some references do this. It is not standard practice, to my knowledge, to abbreviate the acid of an ester in lower case.)
Add a dash between plus sign or minus sign when talking about epimers -- (done)
Include the structure of catechin to show that it is an epimer of epicatechin (image not available)
Species names should not be capitalized only the genus. --(corrected)

As far as the name I think it is because of the pyrocatechol for C and EC and pyrogallol for GC and EGC. I think this is already included. Cheers. --Kupirijo 13:01, 28 December 2006 (UTC)

--(updated, see above. MatthewEHarbowy 03:32, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

Excellent! Thank you. --Kupirijo 22:45, 12 January 2007 (UTC)