Drinking tea with honey and lemon is a good old way to warm up on a cold winter evening. Moreover, it can also be healthy, but only if it is prepared in the right way.
For your own good, do not exaggerate with its temperature, because then it will simply be sweet and tasty, and not valuable for the body. Before you “season” yours wait a few minutes until the water in the cup cools down a bit. By throwing honey or lemon into boiling water, you will lose almost all the benefits of these ingredients.
Let he who does not occasionally throw a lemon into boiling tea cast the first stone. However, this is a big mistake, due to which the popular and considered healthy citrus fruit loses a large part of its valuable properties.
Although the taste remains, research shows that ascorbic acid (vitamin C) decomposes quickly at high temperatureswhich is confirmed by numerous publications available, among others: in the ScienceDirect database. There is much less of it in a hot drink.
So if you care about vitamin C, which for many people is the most valuable ingredient in lemonbefore adding the slices to your tea, you need to wait a while for the drink to cool down a bit. It would be best to add lemon to tea at a temperature of about 50-60 degrees Celsius.
Moreover, experts point out that adding lemon to very hot tea may increase the release of aluminum from tea leaves because the acidic environment favors this process(although in practice these amounts are not considered dangerous for healthy people).
This phenomenon has been described, among others, in research published in the journal Applied Sciences. Therefore, for this reason, it is better to add lemon to a slightly cooled drink.
However, the world of additives that lose their most valuable properties when added to very warm tea does not end with citrus fruits. . Unless you do it solely to sweeten the infusion.
Research described in a text in the Journal of Food Science explains that high temperature leads to a rapid decline in the activity of enzymes present in most types of honey, which are largely responsible for its health-promoting properties. Therefore, it is better to add it only to a slightly cooled drink. Preferably one that is 40 degrees Celsius.
