Is tea acidic or alkaline?

Many of our friends have the habit of drinking tea. We know that drinking tea can not only play a good health-care effect, but also make us more beautiful. Therefore, we must know how to use tea to serve our health. We often have such a question: is tea alkaline or acidic? To get the answer to this question, we need to take a deeper look at tea.

Friends often ask this question: Is tea alkaline? Most tea drinkers know that tea is a weakly alkaline food, but if we use a PH reagent to test it, its PH value is roughly between 5.5-7, which is acidic. So is tea an acidic or alkaline food? How do we identify the acidity and alkalinity of food? And on what basis do we determine the acidity and alkalinity of food? I believe that most people do not have a clear understanding of the acidity and alkalinity of food. Is it reliable to determine the acidity and alkalinity by taste?

First, let us briefly understand the pH value. PH is the abbreviation of the French word Pouvoir Hydrogène. The hydrogen ion concentration index (hydrogen ion concentration) refers to the ratio of the total number of hydrogen ions in the solution to the total amount of substance. Its numerical value is referred to as the pH value. The pH value is a numerical value that indicates the acidity or alkalinity of a solution, that is, the negative value of the common logarithm of the hydrogen ion concentration it contains. The pH value, also known as the hydrogen ion activity index, is a scale of hydrogen ion activity in a solution, which is also a measure of the acidity or alkalinity of a solution in the usual sense. The pH value is indicated by numbers from 1 to 14. A pH value of 7 is neutral, a pH value below 7 is acidic, and a pH value above 7 is alkaline. At room temperature, the pH value is a scale for detecting the acidity and alkalinity of a solution. The acidity and alkalinity of solutions must be tested in many places in life and medicine, and the acidity and alkalinity of these solutions must be indicated by pH values.

The acidity and alkalinity of food are not simply determined by pH reagents and taste, but by the substances produced by its oxidation in the human body, or in other words, by the final metabolic products (inorganic salts) of food in the human body. If the metabolites contain cations such as calcium, magnesium, potassium, sodium, and iron, they are alkaline foods; on the contrary, if they contain more sulfur, chlorine, and phosphorus, they are acidic foods. Therefore, although vinegar and fruit taste sour, they are indeed alkaline foods. The acidity or alkalinity of food has nothing to do with its pH value (food that tastes sour is not necessarily acidic food). It is mainly defined by whether the food becomes acidic or alkaline substances in the human body after being digested, absorbed, and metabolized.

If tea leaves are burned into ashes, the ash will contain about 6% inorganic matter; potassium accounts for about 50%, phosphoric acid accounts for about 15%, and manganese, iodine, sodium, iron, magnesium, lime, soda, etc. account for about 35%; from the medical and nutritional point of view, foods with inorganic components can keep the human body weakly alkaline, and by drinking tea, especially about half an hour after a meal, we can regulate the acidic blood caused by excessive intake of fish and meat (acidic food) during meals and restore it to a weak alkaline state; so tea is a weakly alkaline food.

In the above article, we introduced a common question, that is, whether tea is acidic or alkaline. In order to get the answer to this question, we analyzed the chemical composition of tea in detail above, and the answer we came to is that tea is alkaline.