Chemistry World Blog

Well, here I am at the 240th National meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston, US. According to the promotional material on the ACS website, this is what Boston looks like:

— boston bay

However, as it’s been raining most of the day since I got inside the convention centre, my view is a little more like this:

— rainy

The ACS is probably the biggest chemistry conference in the world, which means there’s plenty of interesting stuff going down here. So I can ignore the rain (apart from as I flit between the umpteen hotels over which the meeting spreads) and take in the shower of chemical goodies.

Weak tea and turbo potatoes

Two of today’s more quirky talks focused on antioxidants. There’s some debate about the health benefits of antioxidants at the best of times, but Shiming Li and Nancy Rawson from a small company called WellGen have added to the controversy. They tested a range of bottled tea drinks, and found that many of them have hardly any polyphenol antioxidants in them at all, certainly too little to have any noticeable health benefit. ‘The minimum dose for any kind of benefit is 125mg per day,’ says Li, ‘but over half of the drinks we tested contained less than 10mg in the whole bottle.’

— cup of tea

The supposed health benefits of polyphenols such as the catechins and flavonoids in tea have led to a profusion of tea-based drinks – bottled for consumers’ convenience in the supermarket. However, as Li explains, there is no standard by which antioxidant content has to be measured, nor is there any requirement to label these drinks with the amounts of polyphenols they contain. As long as there is some tea or tea extract in the ingredients somewhere, companies can associate their products with all the goodness of a strong cup of freshly brewed tea. And it doesn’t stop there, these tea drinks also often contain large amounts of sugar to mask the bitter and astringent taste of the polyphenols, so not only will they not prevent you from getting cancer, your teeth will rot away and you’ll pile on the pounds, too. Best stick to a simple cuppa, methinks.

— mr potato head super hero

But if you don’t like tea (like me) there is another option – supercharged potatoes. Kazunori Hironaka from Obihiro University in Japan, has discovered that electrocuting a potato or pounding it with ultrasound for a few minutes can increase its antioxidant levels by around 50 per cent. While Hironaka admitted that he hadn’t actually eaten one of these supercharged potatoes, he claimed that around 80 per cent of the polyphenolic compounds should survive cooking, and that the texture of the potato should be more or less unchanged.

I wonder if that means that sonicators will become the next must-have kitchen gadget…

Phillip Broadwith