The curious historical past of Saharan tea and its marine properties | The stone ax Science | EUROtoday

Thanks to Bertolucci and his movie The protecting sky, within the early 90s the novels of Paul Bowles grew to become trendy; tales of women and men who face the rigor of different cultures to which they can not totally adapt.

But issues began a lot earlier, when The Police launched their newest album, which featured a music that was a nod to Paul Bowles. The music was titled Tea within the Sahara and, at the moment, Bowles was an outdated man along with his eyes pale by the aquatic gentle of Tangier, town that might see him die a while later, at virtually ninety years outdated.

With all this, the inexperienced tea development appeared in Western cities, occupying a most well-liked place alongside black espresso or espresso with milk. Served in a small glass with mint, inexperienced tea quickly grew to become a ritual with literary aromas starting from Paul Bowles to Arabian Nights. The unique element was not lacking within the three glasses, one for all times, one other for love and the final for dying. However, tea was not found by the Moroccans, however by the Chinese.

It is a useful plant, whose infusion has promoted well being for millennia on account of polyphenols, molecules that defend cells from oxidative injury. Initially, tea was a drink of the Chinese aristocracy and we needed to await the autumn of the Mongol Empire for tea to interrupt the borders and cease being a drink of the elite. But what pursuits us right here is that tea was the availability that might not be lacking on ships when China was the naval energy of the world (1405-1433). The quantity of vitamin C contained within the infusion prevented scurvy, a illness also called sailors' illness.

It is estimated that between the fifteenth and 18th centuries, round three million sailors died from scurvy, a illness that led to dying after the oral tissue rotted, inflicting a sticky halitosis. Nobody knew what the reason for this illness was.

And it’s right here the place the Scottish physician James Lind (1716-1794) will make historical past, who will search for the treatment by giving totally different diets to sailors with a view to distinction the consequences. As he deduced, sauerkraut helped, which is why the well-known Captain Cook pressured his crew to eat sauerkraut; however the pickled cabbage didn’t fully heal.

The resolution would come from the hand of a naturalist named Joseph Banks, who launched into the Endeavour of Cook and on whose voyage by way of the Pacific he caught scurvy. Frightened by an sickness that was taking its toll on his mouth, Banks tried totally different therapies, beer, sauerkraut and, lastly, lemon juice, thus discovering the answer, as he recounts in one of many entries in his logbook. “The effect was surprising, in less than a week my gums became stronger than ever.”

When he let Cook know, he included citrus fruits in his crew's food plan and, with it, no man on the Endeavour died of scurvy. If that they had requested the Chinese, many deaths might have been averted.

But our Eurocentrism doesn’t enable us to call the Chinese as pioneers relating to eradicating scurvy. They found the treatment primarily based on inexperienced tea, a drink that, years later, Paul Bowles would make well-known underneath the protecting sky of Morocco.

The stone ax It is a bit the place Montero Glezwith a need for prose, workout routines its specific siege on scientific actuality to show that science and artwork are complementary types of data.

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