By how long must one separate milk and tea/chocolate?

Factual Questions
1

So now it’s pretty well established that consuming milk or cheese will cancel out the health benefits of the micronutrients in tea and chocolate (and probably red wine, as well).

The studies that I can find so far, though, are limited to the cases where the milk products are mixed with the tea/chocolate, or at least taken at the same time. But none of them address the obvious next question, as to how long we need to separate them by to avoid the canceling effects.

So, if I have cream in my coffee in the morning, how long is it before my next cup of tea will bring me some health benefits?

2

It’s difficult to say.

Here’s why and an estimate anyway.

50% of stomach contents emptied 2.5 to 3 hours
Total emptying of the stomach 4 to 5 hours

FWIW I have some medications that say to take them 1 hour before or 1 1/2 hrs after meals to avoid food interactions.

3

The study was about the effects of skim milk and tea. Cheese is made mostly with whole milk, when you remove some of the components of a food during a test you can’t make the claim that the whole food will act the same.

4

The study was conducted on 42 postmenopausal women and the report says that other studies showed no effect of milk on antioxidants so I’d not put my entire faith in this one study. I believe ‘pretty well established’ can’t be stated until multiple studies are conducted which replicate the results.

5

I also need to say that “pretty well established” cannot be in any way applied to these findings. “Extremely preliminary” would be the most I would be willing to go along with.

One caveat with Quiddity Glomfuster: Only 16 of the volunteers actually completed the study out of the 42 who began it.

That’s a small study group - and the large number of dropouts adds to how suspect the findings are. Articles like these are mainly done to get the authors’ names into a journal. They may indicate good routes for further research but by themselves they mean nothing.

kanicbird, the study specifically singles out the milk proteins as the means of interference so if the findings were to hold up there is no reason that cheese eaten with plain tea would react differently. Skimmed milk has a full complement of milk proteins. If the amount of protein in skimmed milk produces this effect, then the greater quantity of protein as cheese should also do so. The lack of fat wouldn’t make a difference.

What is 10% skimmed milk anyway? In the U.S. we have fat free, 1% fat and 2% fat milks, where whole milk is about 4% fat. Does 10% mean that only 10% of fat remains? If not, what is it 10 per cent of?

6

Whole milk is usually 3.5+% fat, so 2% has roughly 1/2 the fat and 1% about 1/4.

7

I’m pretty sure they mean that the contents of the cup are 90% black tea and 10% milk.

8

… if the only things that are affected are the antioxydants, then there’s still a bunch of things left that aren’t affected.

Chocolate contains several alkaloids (theobromine for example), magnesium… those aren’t antioxydants.