2025-02-24 ノースウェスタン大学
＜関連情報＞
- https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2025/02/brewing-tea-removes-lead-from-water/
- https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.4c01030
きれいな水の醸造： お茶を淹れることによる金属除去効果 Brewing Clean Water: The Metal-Remediating Benefits of Tea Preparation
Benjamin Shindel,Caroline Harms,Stephanie Wang,Vinayak Dravid
ACS Food Science & Technology Published: February 24, 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1021/acsfoodscitech.4c01030
Abstract
The study of adsorbent materials rarely extends beyond engineered systems. This research explores metal adsorption resulting from the preparation of tea, which is the most widely consumed beverage globally. Tea is brewed from the processed leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, a material understudied, relative to its outsized economic and cultural importance. The features that make tea leaves ideal for their intended purpose also help them function as an efficient sorbent. In this Letter, the properties of tea leaves relevant to the adsorption of metal content in drinking water are measured and used to estimate, for the first time, the adsorptive performance under a variety of conditions of tea preparation, with an eye toward public health benefits. We find that the preparation of black tea under typical conditions results in the removal of a meaningful fraction of lead from drinking water and that this value is highly dependent on steeping time.
