Does the decaffeination process used on green teas destroy its antioxidants?”
I first found this article, Green tea in chemoprevention of cancer which discussed the antioxidant benefits of green tea. Though I can’t copy from the PDF of the article, I can summarize the data and you can read it yourself: a cup of green tea contains about 400 mg of antioxidants (200 mg as ECGC), and there seems to be a saturation limit (if you drink green tea all day long, the antioxidant level in your blood doesn’t keep going up). To answer your question, I found this article, “Determination and Characterization of Caffeine in Tea, Coffee and Soft Drinks by Solid Phase Extraction and High Performance Liquid Chromatography,” which describes the decaffeination process thusly: Studies on green tea decaffeinated with ethyl acetate have shown the potential for up to 30% of epigallocathechin
