Really hot (but not scalded) milk tastes fantastic to me, so I’ve often added it to tea. I don’t really care much about the health benefits of tea per se; I’m mostly curious if anyone has additional evidence one way or the other.
The surest way to resolve the controversy is to replicate the studies until it’s clear that some of them were sloppy, unlucky, or lies. But, short of that, should I speculate that perhaps some people are opposed to milk drinking in general, or that perhaps tea in the researchers’ home country is/isn’t primarily taken with milk? I’m always tempted to imagine most of the scientists having some ulterior motive or prior belief they’re looking to confirm.
It would be cool if researchers sometimes (credibly) wrote: “we did this experiment hoping to show X, but instead, we found not X”. Knowing under what goals research was really performed (and what went into its selection for publication) would be valuable, especially if plans (and statements of intent/goal) for experiments were published somewhere at the start of work, even for studies that are never completed or published.
Bad luck could be, not just getting that 5% result which 95% accuracy implies, but some non-obvious difference in the volunteers (different genetics?), in the tea. or in the milk.
It isn’t that odd. There are a lot of things that could easily change the results. Exact temperature of tea (if one protocol involved hotter or colder water), temperature of milk, type of milk, type of tea (one of the protocols uses black tea, and another uses green tea). Note also that the studies are using different metrics as well.
Supposedly (actual study) milk reduces catechin level in bloodstream.
Other research says: “does not!”
Really hot (but not scalded) milk tastes fantastic to me, so I’ve often added it to tea. I don’t really care much about the health benefits of tea per se; I’m mostly curious if anyone has additional evidence one way or the other.
The surest way to resolve the controversy is to replicate the studies until it’s clear that some of them were sloppy, unlucky, or lies. But, short of that, should I speculate that perhaps some people are opposed to milk drinking in general, or that perhaps tea in the researchers’ home country is/isn’t primarily taken with milk? I’m always tempted to imagine most of the scientists having some ulterior motive or prior belief they’re looking to confirm.
It would be cool if researchers sometimes (credibly) wrote: “we did this experiment hoping to show X, but instead, we found not X”. Knowing under what goals research was really performed (and what went into its selection for publication) would be valuable, especially if plans (and statements of intent/goal) for experiments were published somewhere at the start of work, even for studies that are never completed or published.
It does seem odd to get such divergent results.
Bad luck could be, not just getting that 5% result which 95% accuracy implies, but some non-obvious difference in the volunteers (different genetics?), in the tea. or in the milk.
It isn’t that odd. There are a lot of things that could easily change the results. Exact temperature of tea (if one protocol involved hotter or colder water), temperature of milk, type of milk, type of tea (one of the protocols uses black tea, and another uses green tea). Note also that the studies are using different metrics as well.
Nitpick: the second study included both black and green tea.
However, your general point stands, and I’ll add that there are different sorts of both black and green teas.