Abstract
Vitamin B2, also known as riboflavin (RF) is an essential micronutrient for human health and must be obtained from dietary sources. Plants biosynthesize riboflavin and are important dietary sources of vitamin B2 for humans. Our present study reports sensitive detection of vitamin B2 in widely consumed tea infusions, namely black, green, sage and rosemary tea infusions, by a capillary electrophoresis method combined with laser induced fluorescence detection. Moreover, the correlation between the vitamin B2 content of tea plants with their total phenolics (TPs) and antioxidant capacity are evaluated in this study. Whereas green teas have the highest TPs and antioxidant capacity, the highest RF content is in sage infusions. The RF content ranged between 0.34 and 10.36 µg/g for all tea samples studied. Comparing the RF content of tea samples found in this study to the RF content of known RF sources, tea infusions are proposed as important dietary sources of vitamin B2.
Highlights
Tea from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant is the most widely consumed drink in the world, after water
Fermentation is a natural process and oxidation during fermentation is caused by a natural enzyme in the tea leaves themselves
While green tea is not fermented, black tea is subjected to full fermentation and the color of the tea leaves change to black
Summary
Tea from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant is the most widely consumed drink in the world, after water. There are three kinds of tea products produced from the same plant: Black (fermented), green (not fermented) and oolong (partially fermented) teas. Fermentation is a natural process and oxidation during fermentation is caused by a natural enzyme in the tea leaves themselves. While green tea is not fermented, black tea is subjected to full fermentation and the color of the tea leaves change to black. Tea is adietary source of many bioactive compounds. Both black and green tea contain bioactive phenolic compounds mainly gallic, trans-cinnamic, caffeic, ferulic, p-coumaric acids, catechin, epicatechin, quercetrin, and caffeine [1,2]
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