Your chai after lunch may be keeping you anaemic
Tea taken with a meal can cut the iron your body absorbs from it by more than half. And nearly 6 in 10 Indian women are already anaemic.
Chai with food is a national habit. A cup with the breakfast paratha, another straight after lunch, one more with the evening snack. Hardly anyone thinks of it as a problem.
Tea contains tannins, plant compounds that latch on to iron in the gut and stop it being absorbed. The effect is strongest on the kind of iron found in plant foods, which is where most of the iron in a vegetarian Indian diet comes from: dal, rajma, chana, green leafy vegetables, jaggery. Studies have found that a cup of tea with a meal can reduce the iron absorbed from that meal by well over half. Coffee does something similar.
That matters because anaemia here is very common. The latest National Family Health Survey found that 57% of women aged 15 to 49, and 67% of children under five, were anaemic. Tiredness, getting breathless on the stairs, pale skin, cold hands, hair fall and poor concentration are often blamed on "stress" when low iron is the real reason.
In 2024 the Indian Council of Medical Research updated its dietary guidelines to advise avoiding tea and coffee for an hour before and after meals.
Small changes that help - Leave about an hour between your meal and your chai. - Add something with vitamin C to iron-rich meals: lemon on the dal, amla, guava, tomato or an orange. Vitamin C helps iron get absorbed. - Cooking in an iron kadhai adds a little iron to the food. - If you are tired all the time, a simple blood test (haemoglobin, and ferritin if needed) will tell you whether iron is the reason. Don't start iron tablets without one.
Where this comes from - National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), 2019-21. - ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition. Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024. - Hurrell RF et al. Inhibition of non-haem iron absorption in man by polyphenolic-containing beverages. British Journal of Nutrition, 1999.
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