Quantitative Study of Antioxidants and Their Reactivity in Various Tea

Tea is known as one of the most popular beverage throughout the world.  Lately it has also attracted consumers due to its health benefits through antioxidant properties.  Research shows different methods to identify and quantify these antioxidant-polyphenols.  But not much research has gone into (1) carefully quantifying what polyphenols are really active as antioxidants and (2) consumer products and their antioxidant content in consurmer products.  In this project, various tea ranging from lose leaf tea to already brewed bottled tea are used to identify and quantify the polyphenols and measure how reactive these are as antioxidants.  Polyphenol activity is measured using different potentiometric methods as well as a colorimetric method.  These results will enable us to understand what content of antioxidants are present is each tea and are all antioxidants are active in presence of radicals.