Development and Characterization of Herbal Tea Supplemented with Beetroot

Abstract

Imbalance in nutrition results in oxidative stress, which is caused by access to free radicals in the body. This oxidative stress has been linked to a variety of chronic health issues, making antioxidants a crucial part of the diet. The antioxidants are primarily found in fruits, spices, vegetables, and herbs. Herbal tea is quickly becoming a popular health product due to its inexpensive cost, pleasant taste, and aroma. Herbal tea is rich in bioactive substances such as antioxidants, polyphenols, and flavonoids, effectively battling life-threatening disorders such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arteriosclerosis, cancer, bone, and brain diseases. The main objective of this research was to develop an instant herbal tea powder with the potential to treat chronic disorders. Furthermore, its bioactive profile and nutritional assessment will be performed. For this purpose, the herbal tea was developed using beetroot, hibiscus, lemon peel, and anhydrous honey. Four treatments were made as T0 (control) containing 90% hibiscus, T1 containing 75% hibiscus and 15% beetroot, T2 containing 60% hibiscus and 30% beetroot, T3 containing 45% hibiscus and 45% beetroot, 5% anhydrous honey and 5% lemon peel were constant in all treatments. The tea was subjected to proximate, mineral, total phenolic, total flavonoid, DPPH, and physicochemical evaluations. The proximate analysis for the best stand-out treatment (T3) of herbal tea includes the moisture content 18.20%, ash content 8.6%, crude protein 5.6%, crude fat 1.12%, and crude fiber 14.07%. The best mineral content for iron 12.5mg, calcium 185mg, potassium 350.5mg all are of T3 out of all treatments. The phenolic content of herbal tea was highly significant for all the treatments given the best results by T3 1.95mg GAE/g, including TFC 43.45mg QE/g and DPPH 94.1%, because of beetroot addition as beetroot exhibits highly phenolic properties. The pH and acidity values for T3 are 2.84, 0.883% respectively. Furthermore, the evaluation was done for consumer’s acceptability, sensory parameters like taste, aroma, colour, and overall acceptability. The T3 treatment stands out to be the most potent and overall acceptable from all four treatments with the best score in sensory evaluation done by 9 -hedionic scale proforma. Keywords: Tea, beetroot, antioxidants, oxidative stress.