Sore throat? Try Gargling with Green Tea

by Michael Greger, M.D.

During my monthly treasure hunt for articles, I ran across a title I couldn't resist: "Antibacterial Activity of Vegetables..." And the experiment it described is indeed as cool as it sounded.

California researchers were evidently sitting around some day and thought, "Hmm, I wonder if rutabagas have any antibiotic quality?" So theygot funding to take a few dozen organic fruits and veggies, put them each through a juicer and dripped some juice into bacterial broths and saw if the veggies kicked any bacterial tush.[4]

None of the green veggies affected the bacteria, but interestingly the red fruits and veggies--beets, red onion, red cabbage, cherries, cranberries, and raspberries had a mild inhibitory effect on pathogenic bacteria, with pomegranates coming out on top. That is, until they tested green tea and garlic, which had some serious bacterial butt kicking abilities.

To test just how powerful our plant-based champs were, they put garlic and green tea up against three of the scariest bacteria known to humankind, the bacterial strains resistant to almost every known antibiotic (thanks in part to modern agribusiness saturating animal feed with antibiotics). And our little plant-based defenders prevailed, killing the unkillable bugs. The researchers proposed that maybe hospital staff ought to start washing their hands in green tea or dripping some into antibiotic resistant infections.

So, gargling with warm green tea may help those with infected sore throats. (But, if your sore throat is accompanied by swollen glands and fever, you should get tested for strep throat. This study didn't test efficacy against the strep bug, and untreated strep can lead to long-term heart complications.) We don't yet know if green tea or garlic will help with internal infections, but many of the garlic compounds are exhaled through the lungs after ingestion and could conceivably help fight off respiratory tract infections.

Note that they also tried commercial garlic tablets, which were found to be useless. And cooked garlic didn't work either, so to help fight off infections you'd have to eat the garlic raw (like maybe in hummous, salsa, guacamole, etc). And all that raw garlic may even prevent disease transmission as no one will want to come kiss you :)

REFERENCES

[4] Nutrition 19(2003):994.