Your Daily Tea Routine Is Protecting You From Heavy Metals, Study Finds

Researchers have identified another great reason to drink tea: it naturally purifies water. Researchers from Northwestern University have found that tea leaves absorb certain harmful metals from water, such as lead and cadmium, preventing us from ingesting them. The researchers emphasize that tea leaves shouldn’t replace water filters, but their work sheds light on how this beloved drink is passively protecting our health. Their study, published Monday in the journal ACS Food Science & Technology, finally gives tea drinkers a real reason to feel superior to coffee drinkers. “I’m not sure that there’s anything uniquely remarkable about tea leaves as a material,” Benjamin Shindel, the study’s first author and an engineer at Northwestern University, said in a university statement. “But what is special is that tea happens to be the most consumed beverage in the world. You could crush up all kinds of materials to get a similar metal-remediating effect, but that wouldn’t necessarily be pra ... Read full article.