🌿 Folk Prescriptions

The health benefits of tea are undeniable, but different individuals have different requirements. Those with poor health should drink tea cautiously. These can be summarized into 21 rules as follows:
1. Avoid tea when feverish
Tea contains caffeine, which raises body temperature and reduces medication effectiveness.
2. Liver patients should avoid tea
Caffeine and other substances in tea are mainly metabolized by the liver. If the liver is diseased, excessive tea consumption exceeding the liver’s metabolic capacity can harm liver tissue.
3. Nervous exhaustion patients should drink tea cautiously
Caffeine in tea stimulates the central nervous system. Patients with nervous exhaustion drinking strong tea, especially in the afternoon or evening, may experience insomnia and worsened conditions. They can drink tea once in the morning and once in the afternoon—morning tea preferably floral tea, afternoon tea green tea—and avoid tea in the evening. This way, they remain alert during the day and calm at night, aiding earlier sleep.
4. Pregnant women should avoid tea, especially strong tea
Tea contains large amounts of tannins and caffeine, which negatively affect fetal development. To ensure normal intellectual growth and avoid excessive caffeine stimulation, pregnant women should limit or avoid tea.
5. Nursing mothers should avoid strong tea
Strong tea introduces excessive caffeine into breast milk. Infants absorb it indirectly, leading to excitement, frequent crying, and poor sleep.
6. Ulcer patients should drink tea cautiously
Tea stimulates gastric acid secretion. Drinking tea increases gastric acid production, intensifying irritation to ulcer sites. Regular consumption of strong tea may worsen the condition. However, mild cases may drink weak tea two hours after medication; sweet black tea or milk-added black tea can help reduce inflammation and protect the gastric mucosa, offering some benefit to ulcers. Tea can also inhibit the synthesis of nitrosamine compounds in the body, preventing precancerous mutations.
7. Malnourished individuals should avoid tea
Tea promotes fat breakdown. For malnourished people, drinking tea further depletes nutrients, worsening malnutrition.
8. Avoid tea when drunk
Tea stimulates the central nervous system. Drinking strong tea after alcohol intoxication increases cardiac burden.
Tea accelerates diuresis, causing toxic aldehydes in alcohol to be excreted via kidneys before proper metabolism, posing significant kidney stress and harming health. Therefore, those with heart or kidney conditions or poor function should avoid tea, especially strong tea. Healthy individuals may drink a small amount of strong tea, and after sobering up, speed up metabolism by eating large amounts of fruit or sipping vinegar to alleviate drunkenness.
9. Be cautious using tea to take medicine
Medications vary widely in type and properties; whether tea can be used to swallow them cannot be generalized.
Tannins and alkaloids in tea can chemically react with certain drugs. When taking sedatives, tranquilizers, iron supplements, enzyme preparations, or protein-containing medications, tea polyphenols may bind with iron to form precipitates, so tea should not be used to swallow medicine, to avoid affecting efficacy.
Some herbal medicines like ephedra, hook vine, and coptis should not be mixed with tea. Generally, avoid tea within two hours of taking medication.
When taking certain vitamin supplements, tea does not affect efficacy. In fact, tea polyphenols promote accumulation and absorption of vitamin C in the body. Since tea itself contains various vitamins and possesses stimulating, diuretic, lipid-lowering, and blood glucose-lowering effects, it can enhance drug efficacy and support recovery.
Additionally, the common belief that one should not drink tea while taking tonics like ginseng or deer antler has some basis.
10. Anemic patients should avoid tea
Tea tannins bind with iron to form insoluble complexes, reducing iron availability in the body. Thus, anemic patients should avoid tea.