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THE ROOIBOS CANTATA

In Johann Sebastian Bach's famous Coffee Cantata, the young girl, Lieschen, croons:

"Mm! how sweet coffee tastes, More delicious than a thousand kisses, Mellower than muscatel wine. Coffee, coffee I must have, And if someone wishes to give me a treat, Ah, then pour me out some coffee!"

I know the feeling. In my daily rounds I find myself gravitating to those stores (food coop, supermarket, kitchen gadget emporium, etc.) that have a welcoming carafe of coffee. But coffee is not healthful, and in fact some people are exquisitely sensitive to the effects of caffeine. Even decaffeinated coffee can upset their equilibrium. Like many, I am always on the lookout for the perfect coffee substitute. Tea (black, green or white) is an obvious choice, and I drink a lot of it, but this also contains caffeine. And so I scour the health food store shelves, looking for something that will give the kick of a cup of java but be entirely caffeine-free.

I've tried them all. The chicory-and-grain based coffee substitutes and I go way back. The tea-flavored herbal beverages. The strange tasting Asian beans. And more tisanes of chamomile or berry leaves than you can shake a branch at. I can't say I've found the perfect caffeine-less jolt, but lately, I have been enjoying a beverage called Rooibos (pronounced Roy-boss), or African red bush tea. Rooibos is a nice, strong beverage, well worth adding to your morning armamentarium.

First of all, Rooibos is tea only in the sense that it is hot, brewed and is derived from a plant. It is decidedly not "tea" in the botanical sense of being part of the Camellia sinensis family. Rooibos is from the leaves and stems of Aspalathus linearis, a legume.

Roobios means literally "red bush" in Afrikaans. It grows in abundance on the Cederberg Mountains above Cape Town, and is the traditional drink of the indigenous population of South Africa's Western Cape. It can be picked wild but these days it is more commonly cultivated in plantations. Local people have harvested the wild plants for hundreds of years. They made tea by bruising the spiky leaves of the bush with wooden hammers and leaving them out to ferment. A botanist named Carl Humberg first reported the resulting beverage in 1772.

Commercial exploitation began in 1904 when Benjamin Ginsberg, an immigrant from Czarist Russia, found local folk drinking it in abundance. Mr. Ginsberg's family was in the tea business and so he immediately saw the commercial potential of 'mountain tea'. During the late 1920s, its popularity spread throughout the Cape. Pieter le Frans Nortier, a South African doctor and amateur botanist, encouraged widespread cultivation of the tea. Rooibos' big break came during World War II when it became nearly impossible to get regular Ceylon tea. Red bush tea gained favor as an ersatz, or substitute, tea throughout the British Empire, and it continues to be popular to this day, now being exported to 135 countries around the globe

The retail cost of red tea in the health food store is a reasonable $13-$15 per pound. You can buy it as is, or gussied up with other herbs and spices. Republic of Tea sells an excellent "Red Chai" that also contains cinnamon, orange peel, ginger root, cardamom seeds, black pepper, star anise and clove. It is delicious but the price is $7.95 for 2.8 ounces, which works out to over $45 per pound.

So what exactly can Rooibos do for you? By reputation, it is a 'miracle tea' that is widely used for nervous tension, allergies (dermatitis), and various digestive problems (Bramati 2002). Rooibos is a good source of vitamin C, as well as small amounts of magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, chloride, and potassium. It contains no caffeine and, unlike regular tea, does not interfere with iron absorption (Hesseling 1979). Rooibos also contains many antioxidants known as flavonoids, such as aspalathin, rutin, and orientin (Bramati 2002). These antioxidants function as free radical scavengers, preventing damage to normal cells.

Building the Immune System

There are currently about 20 scientific articles on the topic of Rooibos tea. Most of this research has been carried out in Japan, which has as lively an interest in tea as any other country on earth.

Scientists at the University of Shizuoka, Japan, compared the ability of green, black and red teas to stop mutations caused by chemicals. "Intake of tea might suppress the mutagenic activity of certain potent mutagens in human beings," they wrote. The clear winner was red tea, which operated by a mechanism different from regular tea - "several unknown antimutagenic components could be responsible for its effect," is how they put it (Sasaki 1993).

According to researchers at the University of Nagasaki, red tea also counteracts the cancer-causing properties of radiation. In an experiment to test the protective effect of red tea, a mouse cell line was zapped with cancer-causing rays. The researchers found that the expected transformation of normal into cancerous cells was reduced as the exposure to Rooibos increased. At a certain level, the transformation was reduced to next to nothing (the 'spontaneous level'). Suppression of cancer formation was highest when Rooibos was present during the entire incubation period (Komatsu 1994). Green tea wasn't nearly as powerful in this respect as red tea.

At Japan's Iwate University researchers looked at Rooibos' ability to protect against damage to the central nervous system caused by aging. Young female rats were allowed to drink their fill of Rooibos tea for 21 months. They were then compared to rats that drank only water. The scientists searched for the presence of harmful chemicals called lipid peroxides in the two groups. There was indeed a build up of harmful chemicals in the water-fed, but not the Rooibos-fed, rats.

They then took MRI scans of the brains of young rats, of water-drinking older rats and of Rooibos-drinking rodents, looking for the decline in the intensity of the MRI signal that is typical of aging. There was in fact a decrease in signal intensity in the brains of the old water-drinkers, "whereas little change of the signal intensity was observed in MR images of the same regions [of the brains, ed] of 24-month-old rats" who were allowed to drink Rooibos. In fact, their MRIs "were similar to those of young rats." The scientists concluded that long-term use of Rooibos "prevented age-related accumulation of lipid peroxides in several regions of rat brain" (Inanami 1995).

Rooibos may also be good for the immune system. At least, in one test it increased both antibody and interleukin-2 (IL-2) production. After a detailed study, scientists at Okayama University concluded that "Rooibos tea intake may be of value in prophylaxis [prevention, ed.] of the diseases involving a severe defect in…immune response such as cancer, allergy, AIDS, and other infections" (Kunishiro 2001).

There are also polysaccharides in Rooibos that seem able to prevent HIV infection, at least in the test tube. One such polysaccharide "almost completely inhibited the binding of HIV-1" to experimental cells (Nakano 1997a). Scientists concluded that "it is probable that acid polysaccharides from Rooibos tea were extremely safe, and that HIV infection may be suppressed by daily intake of the alkaline extracts of Rooibos…," according to an article in the journal Leukemia (Nakano 1997b). That's pretty impressive, although no clinical trials have yet been done on Rooibos in the prevention of AIDS, or any other disease, for that matter.

Why not? The reason may be that Rooibos is just too inexpensive and plentiful - and, more to the point, non-patentable - for anyone to care. Yet there is an awful lot of potential benefit in a tea that costs a few pennies per cup.

Bach understood the people-pleasing power of a good cup of coffee as well as its addicting qualities. Were he alive today, he might write a Rooibos Cantata, about the wonders of coffee's formidable non-caffeinated competitor.

--Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D.

References:

Hesseling PB, Klopper JF, van Heerden PD. [The effect of rooibos tea on iron absorption] S Afr Med J. 1979 Apr 14;55(16):631-2.

Inanami O, Asanuma T, Inukai N, Jin T, Shimokawa S, Kasai N, Nakano M, Sato F, Kuwabara M. The suppression of age-related accumulation of lipid peroxides in rat brain by administration of Rooibos tea (Aspalathus linearis). Neurosci Lett. 1995 Aug 18;196(1-2):85-8.

Komatsu K, Kator K, Mitsuda Y, Mine M, Okumura Y. Inhibitory effects of Rooibos tea, Aspalathus linealis, on X-ray-induced C3H10T1/2 cell transformation. Cancer Lett. 1994 Feb 28;77(1):33-8.

Nakano M, Itoh Y, Mizuno T, Nakashima H. Polysaccharide from Aspalathus linearis with strong anti-HIV activity. Biosci Biotechnol Biochem. 1997 Feb;61(2):267-71.(1997a)

Nakano M, Nakashima H, Itoh Y. Anti-human immunodeficiency virus activity of oligosaccharides from rooibos tea (Aspalathus linearis) extracts in vitro. Leukemia. 1997 Apr;11 Suppl 3:128-30.(1997b)

Sasaki YF, Yamada H, Shimoi K, Kator K, Kinae N. The clastogen-suppressing effects of green tea, Po-lei tea and Rooibos tea in CHO cells and mice. Mutat Res. 1993 Apr;286(2):221-32.

Shimoi K, Masuda S, Shen B, Furugori M, Kinae N. Radioprotective effects of antioxidative plant flavonoids in mice. Mutat Res. 1996 Feb 19;350(1):153-61.

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IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER

The news and other items in this newsletter are intended for informational purposes only. Nothing in this newsletter is intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice.