Conscious Choice Seattle: Cup of Snake Oil?

February 2005 | Whole Health

Cup of Snake Oil?

The rising popularity of yerba maté might be stimulated for the wrong reasons

by Kelly Hearn

If you haven’t tried it yet, you’ve doubtless seen it on the shelves of your local natural-foods store or on the drink menu of your favorite coffeehouse. For many people, a strong-tasting, South American tea-like drink called yerba maté (pronounced “urba-ma-tay”) has replaced their daily cup of joe. But along with maté’s new popularity in the United States comes a number of snake-oily claims made by the growing number of companies that sell it.

Consumed centuries ago by Guarani Indian tribes in Paraguay (and later perfected by Spanish colonizers and Jesuit priests), yerba maté is widely considered to be a good natural stimulant that may be more healthful than coffee due to a unique combination of alkaloids and relatively small caffeine content. Critics, however, say rising U.S. sales to fad dieters and health-food junkies overplay such benefits, offering consumers false science and overblown claims about the drink’s chemical consistency and physiological benefits.

Controversy accompanies vendor claims that maté contains not caffeine but a safer chemical called mateine as its major psychoactive drug. Noborders.net and Ma-Tea, a maté importer based in Atlanta, are two examples of companies that advertise their product with a commonly found quote attributed to Dr. José Martin, director of the National Institute of Technology in Paraguay: “New research and better technology have shown that while mateine has a chemical consistency similar to caffeine, the molecular binding is different."

Digging Deeper

But when contacted at his home in Asuncion, Paraguay, the now ex-director (whose name is actually José Martino), said there is no unique chemical structure for mateine and that yerba maté contains caffeine, just like coffee.

That’s no surprise, say many experts.

"In recent U.S. campaigns, yerba maté marketers claim that yerba maté contains mateine,” says Dr. Leslie Taylor, an herbalist and author of “The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs.” “The only studies reporting the presence of‘mateine’ have been funded and paid for by companies selling yerba maté. Scientists can go into the laboratory to prove or disprove what they want to, or are paid to. This kind of research simply does not disprove the many years of research proving the opposite by scientists and university students that have never sold any yerba maté product and had no ulterior motives to conduct or report their research."

Natural health expert Dr. Andrew Weil agrees. Writing on his website, he finds “very little scientific support for this distinction, but you will certainly see health claims to that effect on packages of yerba maté and in advertisements for it."

Though many maté fans cite the absence of coffee-like jitters, experts say the distinction could be a matter of dosage or differences in accompanying minerals or related alkaloids. Even smell, taste, circumstance and expectations can cause psychoactive effects to vary.
Taylor, who has compiled dozens of studies from universities and academic journals, said yerba maté has been assayed to only contain between .7 and 2 percent, with the average leaf yielding about 1 percent, caffeine. Relatively speaking, that’s much less than coffee.
“In living plants, xanthines such as caffeine are bound to sugars, phenols and tannins, and are set free or unbound during the roasting or fermenting processes used to process yerba maté leaves, coffee beans and even cacao beans,” she says. “The mateine chemical‘discovered’ is probably just caffeine bound to a tannin or phenol in the raw leaf."

Pound Foolish

Another seemingly exaggerated claim centers on yerba maté’s ability to help shed pounds. Though the leaves already appear in a number of weight loss pills, the drink itself is becoming popular as an appetite suppressant and meal substitute.

Dan Garcia, a maté distributor in Sandpoint, Idaho, says yerba maté sales in the United States totaled around $2.5 million last year and now account for some 5 percent of tea sales in the United States. His company, Aviva, which bought its own lab analysis of yerba that’s used as a marketing tool, grew 65 percent last year. Aviva was especially boosted by a recent Woman’s World magazine article that celebrated maté as “America’s Weight Loss Tea.” After the article was published, Garcia says, his company’s online sales alone grew from $1,500 to $35,000 in one month.

But what kind of pound buster is it really?

A study published in June in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth in the United Kingdom, says, well, not so much.

Not Beyond Reasonable Doubt

The researchers, who conducted 25 trials and reviewed data on several dietary supplements including yerba maté, concluded that “the reviewed studies provide some encouraging data but no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that any specific dietary supplement is effective for reducing body weight."

Any stimulant, including caffeine and cocaine, suppresses appetite. But experts warn about overuse, something companies aren’t likely to highlight.

"My belief is that yerba maté is a good natural stimulant that contains caffeine,” Taylor says. “Personally I think it is generally better than coffee, which contains several alkaloid chemicals that maté does not, chemicals that seem to be hard on the liver and adrenals with excessive consumption. I do not think that yerba maté is any magic bullet for weight loss, nor should consumers purchase yerba maté to lose weight. I also think consumers should remember that too much of a good thing isn’t necessarily a good thing."

Case in point, she says: “Heavy drinkers of maté in South America were documented with an increased risk of upper-aerodigestive tract cancers, a 1.6- to fourfold increase for heavy drinkers."

Though the Federal Drug Administration does not evaluate or test herbs, it does get involved if reports of consumer harm, misbranding or mislabeling occur. In 2002, FDA officials issued a warning to Dakotah International Inc. for claiming yerba maté reduces blood pressure.

Millions of people in Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay give maté near-religious status, obsessively consuming it throughout the day and making it a hub of intimate social gatherings. It seems certain that yerba maté is getting its North American day. Less clear is whether it will land a respected place in the annals of American herbalism or pass away as another marketing-stained, fly-by-night weight loss fad.

Kelly Hearn is a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor and a former science and technology writer for UPI. This story first appeared at www.alternet.org .

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