A Review on Decaffeination of Tea Products

摘要

Since caffeine possesses some well-unknown adverse effects,many attempts have been conducted to remove it from tea products,including selective extraction with different solvents,enzymatic degradation and inhibition the caffeine synthesis pathway.Reports showed that caffeine can be safely and efficiently removed from fresh tea leaves by hot water blanching,however this approach is not suitable for treating the rolled or dried leaves because of the unavoidable loss of catechins.Although microwave-enhanced vacuum ice water extraction can be used for decaffeination of dried tea,time consumption seems to be the main shortage of this method.Liquefied dimethyl ether might be used as another alternative solvent for selective extraction of caffeine from tea products because of its low toxicity and residum,but its decaffeination efficiency needs to be verified furthermore.It has been proved that supercritical carbon dioxide extraction is an effective approach for removing caffeine from different types of tea products,while the application of the technique is always limited as its expensive equipments and high running costs.Decaffeination with microbe incubation or enzymatic digestion is highly hopeful since many studies showed that some microorganisms can degrade the caffeine through induced demethylase and oxidase under gentle condition in some model systems,unfortunately,this approach is far away from application since security and quality of the decaffeinated products are rarely concerned.Low-caffeine tea products can be easily produced through normal manufacture by using the leaves harvested from some low-caffeine cultivars which are derived through genetic modification or conventional breeding,but these germplasms are very limited.