One of the disadvantages of being a tea review writer is my email gets loaded in questionable tea vendor requests. Lately, a number of unethical tea vendors have been taking advantage of Covid and I have reached my limit.
Early in the Covid pandemic, I had gotten a tea industry newsletter pleading for tea vendors to not talk about the health benefits of tea and covid. As the months went on, that advice was slowly being forgotten, posting, “Tea is great for flu, maybe Covid. Blahblahblah, buy my tea.”
Then a few months back someone in Japan did a study to find tea making covid less infectious. Here is the link to the study in Japanese.
I am not a scientist, my degree is in Psychology, so I got some statistics and research design understanding. Either way, anyone with any critical thinking and reading skills can also see:
- This tea Covid study is not applied to humans nor animals.
- Covid has to be submerged in tea for at least 1 minute, 10 minutes for best results.
- They are using ready to drink, plastic bottled tea.
But somehow, people latch onto a magical tea cure hope, which is dangerous as it could discourage healthy habits and risky behaviour. Though the reality is many tea drinkers from around the world have gotten covid and have died. We wouldn’t be in this mess if it was that easy to prevent Covid.
In the end, the Tea and covid study is best summed up with this relevant xkcd:
Since that study, it has given a green light for vendors to make all sorts of claims. I have started getting emails from tea vendors wanting me to review their Japanese green tea product that will fight Covid. One vendor is so desperate, they emailed me multiple times and even called me (every fellow Millennial now shudders in horror) asking why I haven’t responded to my emails. I told them that their marketing that tea cures covid is disgusting. It is unethical, harmful to oneself and others, and it is taking advantage of the consumer.
So far it has been all Japanese vendors bothering me, usually pushing matcha, but actually, the study found bottled black tea being most effective. If we wanted to get the study results, we’d have to be drowning in floating tanks of Liptons in order to keep Covid away, but even that it might just mean the petri dish is covid free, not us.
Despite everything, I am sure those tea vendors’ matcha products taste fine and do not need unethical marketing. I know retail has had it rough, but many of us have been bunkering down drinking through our best teas to cope.
The comments are off as I don’t have the feathers to yell at every anti-medicine idiot who somehow finds this post. Thank you kind tea peeps, stay safe, and back to our scheduled tea owl review shenanigans.
