Tagged: aspalathin
Rooibos and Breast Cancer, What a Lab Study Found
A Stellenbosch University lab found that rooibos extract steers estrogen toward the receptor that suppresses tumor growth rather than the one that drives it, in breast cancer cells grown in a dish. The researcher who found it is the first to say what that does not yet prove.
Somebody Fed Rooibos to Nine Hundred Tilapia
A 2025 trial at Walter Sisulu University fed fermented and green rooibos extract to 900 Mozambique tilapia for eight weeks. The green-rooibos fish got more growth out of the same feed, though the same fish showed liver changes the authors say need further work.
How Rooibos Became a Health Drink
Rooibos is sold the world over as a wellness drink. That reputation began not in a laboratory but with one South African mother's claim in 1968, and the science has never quite caught up with the marketing.
Green vs Red Rooibos: What Oxidation Changes
Green and red rooibos come from the same bush. One step, oxidation, sets them apart, and it changes the colour, the taste, and how much of the antioxidant aspalathin survives. Here is the difference, plainly.
The Molecule It Took Chemists Forty-Four Years to Copy
Aspalathin was identified in 1965. Chemists did not manage to build it from scratch in a lab until 2010, and the reason is written into the molecule's own shape. Here is what makes rooibos's signature compound so awkward to fake, and why anyone bothered trying.
Rooibos Is Caffeine-Free. It Was Never Decaffeinated.
Rooibos has never contained a milligram of caffeine, and that is a different claim from "decaffeinated." Here is the botany behind the difference, and what decaffeination actually leaves behind in the tea and coffee that need it.
Hard Water Leaves No Scum on Rooibos, but It Does Age the Aspalathin
The standing advice is to brew with filtered water because minerals in hard water dull tea. A 2023 study that tested rooibos directly against black and green tea found the usual reason for that advice does not apply to the red bush at all, though a different, real effect on rooibos's own chemistry does.
Rooibos Extract Starts Fading the Moment It Is Made
The label on a supplement bottle or a jar of face cream says "rooibos extract." Here is what that actually means, how a factory makes it, and the one problem the powder creates for itself the moment it is made.
Rooibos and Honeybush Are Not Cousins, Not Really
Both are caffeine-free, both grow only in the Cape, and both get called "the other South African tea." Past that, they are two different plants from two different tribes of the legume family, two different mountain ranges, and two different antioxidants, and the historical record on how each was actually brewed is stranger than either box on the shelf lets on.
Rooibos and Health: What the Science Supports
A reference on rooibos and health, sorted by how strong the evidence is: what is settled (caffeine-free, low in tannins, antioxidant-rich), what one small human trial suggests, what is shown only in animals, and what has no clinical support at all.