Enjoying morning cuppa? Read this

Ever wondered how healthy is your morning cuppa? Not much, warns Dr Pramod Moghe, the Pune scientist who is known for simple scientific remedies to deal with the dreadful swine flu while it was at its peak. In fact, if Dr Moghe is to be believed, it should be just the tea leaves and water and nothing else if you really want it to be pollutant-free.

“The tea powder that you use is treated with 10 pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals. They enter your tea as you boil it. Tea leaves also contain fluorine and fluorides that could cause serious damage to health,” Dr Moghe pointed out while he was delivering a lecture at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Mutangan Exploratory Science Centre in Pune on Friday.

After tea leaves, Moghe went on to analyse water.

“We are ignorant about the water we drink without knowing if it is fit for consumption. There are 35-40 parameters that decide potability of water. Here, we use lime, alum and chlorine to purify water without knowing its repercussions,” Moghe pointed out.

He stated that overuse of alum can cause Alzheimer’s disease, the trihalomethane created due to chlorine is carcinogenic. The chlorine causes skin and hair problems when used in bath water. And more fatal consequences are asthma, and among women, it affects the reproductive cycle.

And then there is milk and sugar. Moghe made similar observations about milk and sugar, terming the dairy and sugar industry as one of the largest polluters in the world. “The sugar industry causes various kinds of pollution. Each single kg of sugar pollutes 16 litres of water, and at the same time it pollutes the soil and air, not to mention the stench,” Moghe said. “Pesticides used in the fodder for cattle trickle down into the milk and can cause a lot of damage. The dairy industry produces wastage that pollutes the soil,” he adds.

Having scared the audience by stating some disturbing facts, Moghe suggested ways in which the damage could be controlled.

While some measures can be applied from home, others have to be implemented on a community level. “Ideally, it is good to have tea without milk and sugar. You automatically cut down the pollution you are causing with your cup of tea.

As far as clean water is concerned, the authorities have to implement advanced purification methods than rely on adding chemicals to purify it,” he said. “And given that we drink at least 4 to 5 cups everyday, we drink about 16 to 20 gm of pollutants and that’s just tea,” he concluded. Now have your first tea of the morning.