Evaluation of ingredients from living tea plant

This spectrum of biologically active substances can profitably influence human health, resulting in a wide use of this plant for various preventive, therapeutic and most recently, for anti-ageing and mildnessimparting applications.^1–7 The traditional manufacturing processes produce four different types of teas: black, oolong, green and white. Various biological activities are decreased from the least processed to the most processed tea, in the following sequence: white>green>oolong>black. The chemical compositions of the teas change and many therapeutic benefits are decreased as the plant material is exposed to the increased processing.^8,9 In general, when dried plants are extracted, the resulting compounds are limited by their affinity to particular solvent characteristics. As a result, valuable synergistic complexes of compounds existing within living cells can be irreversibly altered or lost.¹⁰ However, it was recently demonstrated that polyphenol chemicals from tea plant may require their complex natural combination forms to provide therapeutic activity, which illustrates the principle: “united they work, divided they fail”.²

Zeta Fraction™ technology enables the effective utilisation of underexplored potential of living plants while protecting the integrity of molecular architecture existing in plant living cells.^11–14 Zeta Fraction technology is based on the density functional theory (DFT) and the fundamental scientific principles discovered by Kelvin, Van’t-Hoff and Debye. Zeta Fraction technology process includes the following steps: collection of living plants with maximum metabolic activity; separation of intracellular colloidal dispersion (cell juice) from fibre-enriched material and return of by-products to the environment; treatments of the intracellular colloidal dispersion to engage particular organelles and biologically active complexes in specific interactions by changing the balance between repulsive and attractive forces; separation of cell organelles to certain Zeta fractions, e.g. fibre-enriched, membrane, cytoplasm, and serum; followed by their transformation to various bioactive ingredients. Notable qualitative differences, a better representation of certain peaks, a greater diversity of compounds and higher biological activities were previously found in the ingredients obtained via Zeta Fraction technology – when compared to green and black tea traditional preparations.^6,7 

This paper encompasses the continuing analytical research and quantitative evaluations of constituents in amphiphilic ingredients and Recentia® CS obtained from living tea plant.