I’ve been doing some research on the health benefits of teas and tisanes for my job and I just realised that… there’s quite a lot of woo in tea. By ‘woo’, I mean people are making incredible health claims about tea.

It’s actually not so bad for actual tea aka the tea made from the Camellia Sinensis plant. A lot of the better publications will add the caveat that studies are still preliminary, although even if there are human studies, a lot won’t mention that these require you to consume insane amounts of tea. Like, amounts that even I can’t consume.

Things get worse when you go into tisanes and if you stumble across the natural living/all organic things are good kind of sites. A lot of them will make grandiose claims that make it sound like certain tisanes can cure cancer and any other sort of illness, but if you look on google scholars, you’ll see that these claims are based on studies that say that this effect sorta maybe happens. On mice (or some other animal).

For example, when I was trying to find out what benefits (if any) agarwood tea has, the manufacturer’s website said that it is “[t]raditionally used to: Regulate blood glucose level, Reduce uric acid production, Relieve anxiety and improve sleep quality” Which sounds pretty awesome and was echoed by a few alternative health sites on google but when I was looking for actual studies, I didn’t find much. All I could say was that yeah, agarwood has traditionally been used for these purposes and there are a few interesting studies but nothing has been proved.

All this lack of information makes writing a sensational and click-worthy article about the health benefits of tea and tisanes quite hard, unless you want to be generic and say something like “this is 100% the healthier choice if you don’t add sugar and are drinking this instead of sugary drinks”. Which is so obvious as to be almost useless.

I do wonder why tea and tisanes make such an attractive target for so many alternative medicine websites. I suppose it’s because they seem more “natural” than other things? But I really hope that people don’t believe all these unsubstantiated claims because while tea is definitely a healthy drink (certainly healthier than sugary stuff!), it’s not a magic bullet.