Drinking tea with meals is healthier

Myth or truth?

Information flows that drinking hot tea with meals instead of cold water and juices, is healthier for the body and aids in weight loss. The magazine Prevention claims it is true and states why.

In Oriental culture, it is common to drink hot tea with meals. Based on this habit, an email was circulated that says cold liquids during and after meals, solidify the oily components of food, slowing and delaying digestion.

According to this e-mail, cold drinks react with the digestive acids and are absorbed faster than solid foods or hardened fats, which therefore remain longer in the intestine. Rather, a lukewarm tea during and / or after a meal facilitates digestion and softens the fats for them to be expelled quickly, and helps in weight loss.

The truth

The physician, Pedro Lôbo de Vale, states that "the disturbance of digestion is possible with the ingestion of drinks at low temperatures due to the risk of thermal shock in the oropharyngeal cavity." However, the information that cold liquids solidify the oily components of food, slowing digestion, "is not necessarily true," since "in a meal, not just fats are ingested (and a great deal of them ingested are already solid, or make part of the constitution of the food), so the eventual solidification of fats in the stomach would not be a harmful event to the organism."

According to the doctor, "the ingestion of a drink, as long as it is not too freezing cold or too hot, helps to swallow food better, but it will not soften fats or help them to be expelled more quickly, because they are not soluble in water," adds the specialist.

Besides that, even if the fat was being solidified with the intake with cold drinks, the body temperature would come back quickly and they would return to the liquid state and, more importantly, "fluid intake, even ice cream, will no longer be at that temperature when reaching the intestine, where digestion and absorption of fat occurs," underlines this specialist.

Translated from the Portuguese version by:

Lisa Karpova

Pravda.Ru