JPH07110213B2 - Food material - Google Patents

Description

TECHNICAL FIELD The present invention relates to a food material, and more specifically, a residual fraction obtained by recovering tea polyphenol from an aqueous extract of tea leaves was added to the aqueous extract of tea leaves. Regarding food ingredients.

[Conventional technology]

Tea has been a favorite beverage since ancient times in Japan, and it has been a tradition rooted in life with a long tradition. Tea is preferred because of its unique umami and physiological effects of caffeine, while it is known that tea has health effects due to its various components, such as Ikegaya, Food Science (1987) 117. Volume, page 29. There, there is an effect of preventing and treating adult diseases such as suppressing cancer, hyperlipidemia, increase in blood pressure, and having an antidiabetic effect.
It is described that caffeine preferentially converts fat into energy, contains a large amount of vitamin E, and has a caries preventive effect. In addition, Shimizu et al. (Japan Society of Biopharmacy (1986), vol. 10) confirmed that an aqueous extract of tea has a hypoglycemic effect in an animal experiment using rats, and that this active substance is a water-soluble polysaccharide. There is.

Focusing on such health effects of tea, from the viewpoint of more effectively ingesting the active ingredient of tea, studies have recently been made on ingesting tea directly as food. In other words, Kuwano et al. (Journal of Japanese Home Economics (1989), 40, 869 pages, and 975 pages) examined the direct intake of tea,
It has been confirmed that it is added to rat feed and does not adversely affect its growth and feed efficiency, and therefore it is highly safe, while it also has the effect of activating lipid metabolism and normalizing liver and serum lipids and the amount of fat stored. ing.

[Problems to be Solved by the Invention]

When it is used as a food material for directly ingesting tea, it is unsuitable as a food as taste due to astringency derived from catechins (tea polyphenols) and bitterness derived from caffeine, and is not suitable for large intake.

[Means for Solving the Problems]

The above-mentioned problems can be solved by using a food material consisting of a water extraction residue of tea leaves.

The conditions for obtaining the water extraction residue of the tea leaves are set for the purpose of removing catechins and caffeine in the tea leaves as much as possible. That is, 5 to 20 times the amount of water is added to ground tea leaves, and the mixture is heated to extract the extract.
From the raw leaves to the finished tea (dry tea), the raw tea leaves may be at any stage of the normal tea making process, and any of unfermented tea, semi-fermented tea and fermented tea can be used regardless of the degree of fermentation. The heating condition is 80 ° C. or higher for about 1 hour, but the extraction condition may be room temperature overnight. The heated mixture is passed in the usual way to separate the water extraction residue and the extract. Usually, 1 kg of tea leaves yield 2 to 4 kg of water extraction residue and 4 kg of Brix 8 extract or 20 kg of Brix 2 extract depending on the amount of water added. The water extraction residue is dried at 60 to 70 ° C overnight to obtain a water extraction dried residue (hereinafter referred to as tea pulp). Normally, 1kg of tea leaves yields 700-800g of tea bulbs.

Compared with tea leaves, about 70% or more of caffeine and polyphenols are removed from the obtained tea pulp, while most of insoluble fibers, vitamins A and E remain, and water-soluble fibers are about
90% removed. Therefore, tea pulp is improved in taste by removing a considerable amount of caffeine and polyphenol, and is more suitable as a food material.

However, most of the water-soluble fiber, which is an important active ingredient of tea, has been transferred to the extract, and the loss from tea pulp is a problem as a food material for the purpose of ingesting the active ingredient for health. is there.

The above-mentioned problems can be solved by adding a residual fraction (hereinafter referred to as fraction B) obtained by recovering tea polyphenol from the tea leaf extract to the food material.

Here, the term "tea polyphenol" means a polyphenol compound contained in tea leaves, that is, (+)-catechin,
(−)-Epicatechin, (+)-gallocatechin, (−)
-Epigallocatechin, (-)-epicatechin gallate,
(−)-Epicatechin gallate, (−)-gallocatechin gallate, refers to a single product or a mixture thereof, and also includes those containing impurities derived from pure tea leaves or raw tea leaves. . The tea polyphenol extract obtained from tea leaves will be described in detail below. On the other hand, tea polyphenols have useful properties such as antioxidative properties and antibacterial properties, but are highly safe, and various application developments based on these are underway, and at the same time, an industrial manufacturing method for them is established. Is being done. That is, an example of a use invention of tea polyphenol is disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 63-63
-9922, 64-90124, and Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 1-265023.

Here, the production of the food material consisting of the water extraction residue of the tea leaves of the present invention can be combined with the above-mentioned production method of tea polyphenol, whereby the productivity of each production method can be increased. This is one of the features.

Next, a method for separating tea polyphenol from the extract will be described. That is, the extract is concentrated or powdered, and then purified (fractionated) with an organic solvent. As this organic solvent, any organic solvent that can be used for ordinary purification can be used, and for example, hexane, n-heptane, acetone, methyl isobutyl ketone, ethyl acetate, ethanol, isopropyl alcohol can be used. The amount of the organic solvent added to the concentrate or powder is the same or 10 times.

Furthermore, the organic solvent-soluble fraction obtained above was subjected to silica gel column chromatography, and chloroform-methanol (20: 1, V / V) and chloroform-methanol (10:
The tea polyphenol compound can be obtained by sequentially eluting with a solvent of 1, V / V). If necessary, it is further applied to Sephadex LH-20 or the like and eluted with a suitable solvent such as methanol, or recycled HPLC (for example, LC-908, GS-320 column manufactured by Nippon Analytical Industry Co., Ltd., solvent By using (methanol), a higher purity tea polyphenol compound can be obtained.

As another method for separating tea polyphenols from the extract, the extract is used as an ultrapermeabilizer (molecular weight cutoff of 5000 to 10000).
It is also possible to recover the tea polyphenol from the passing liquid by treating the liquid with a passing liquid and a concentrated residual liquid by treating with.

The tea polyphenol obtained from the above tea polyphenol separation step and the residual fraction B are finally dried and pulverized.

Fraction B is rich in water-soluble fibers, and about 90% of tea leaf water-soluble fibers are transferred. On the other hand, caffeine and tea polyphenols only transfer about 20% of tea leaves, and therefore,
By adding the fraction B to the above-mentioned tea pulp, water-soluble fiber which is an important active ingredient can be replenished without impairing the taste. In this case, the ratio of the fraction B to be added to the tea pulp is determined by the taste of the resulting mixture as a food material and the content of water-soluble fiber, but it is usually 20-
30%.

Examples of the present invention will be shown below to more specifically describe the present invention.

〔Example〕

Example 1. 10 L of water was added to 1 kg of tea leaves ground by a power mill and sieved with a filter having a diameter of 1.5 mm, and the mixture was heated at 90 to 95 ° C for 30 minutes. Solid-liquid separation of the mixture, 2.4 kg wet residue and Brix4
8.6 kg of the extract was obtained. The wet residue was dried overnight at 70 ° C. to obtain 700 g of tea pulp. The contents of various components of this tea pulp are as shown in Test Example 1 and Table 1. Further, tea pulp has almost no astringency and bitterness, and in this respect, it can be sufficiently used as a raw material for food materials.

Example 2. After concentrating the extract (8.6 kg, Brix4) obtained in Example 1,
Powderize by spray drying and extract the powder with 4 times amount of ethanol and divide into an extract containing tea polyphenol and fraction B, which are respectively (evaporated) dried and powdered to give 80 g of tea polyphenol and 220 g of fraction B. Obtained. The contents of the tea polyphenol and various components of the fraction B are shown in Table 1.

Next, 700 g of tea pulp obtained in Example 1 from 1 kg of tea leaves
And 220 g of the fraction B obtained in Example 2 and the content of various components of a mixture (hereinafter referred to as a purified tea mixture) mixed in the total amount (containing 100 g of tea leaves or each fraction obtained from 100 g of tea leaves) The amount) is as shown in Table 1, and it has almost no astringency and bitterness, and in this respect, it can be sufficiently used as a food material.

Test Example 1. The content of each of the tea leaf fractions obtained in the above Examples
Shown in the table. The component measuring method is a usual method used for food analysis. The numerical values in the table are the content of components in 100 g of tea leaves or in each fraction obtained from 100 g of tea leaves by the method of Example 1 or Example 2.

[Effects of the Invention] The tea pulp, which is the water extraction residue of the tea leaves of the present invention, has almost no astringency derived from catechins and bitterness derived from caffeine, and is suitable for direct ingestion of tea, and especially tea leaves The purified tea mixture containing the fraction B obtained by recovering the tea polyphenol from the water extract of No. 1 contains most of the active ingredients peculiar to tea, and there is almost no taste problem due to the astringency and bitterness described above. It is extremely suitable as a food material for directly ingesting tea and effectively utilizing its health-effective component.

Further, the production of the food material according to the practice of the present invention can be carried out in combination with the production method of tea polyphenol, which has recently been established in industrial importance, and thereby the productivity of each production method can be improved. It is also one of the features of the present invention that it can be enhanced.

 ─────────────────────────────────────────────────── ─── Continuation of the front page (72) Inventor Nagataka Yamazaki 9-5 Akahori Shinmachi, Yokkaichi-shi, Mie Sun Kagaku Co., Ltd. Inspector Eriko Suzuki (56) Reference JP-A-2-97353 (JP, A) ) JP-A 1-265023 (JP, A) JP 61-34792 (JP, B2)

Claims (1)

[Claims] 1. A food material in which a residual fraction obtained by recovering tea polyphenol from an aqueous extract of tea leaves is added to the aqueous extract of tea leaves.