Bandara et al. 2025 — Bael herbal-tea mineral and heavy-metal profile

Bandara et al. formulated herbal tea from bael whole flowers, stamens, and immature fruits and measured mineral content by ICP-MS. The heavy-metal relevance is narrow but routeable: Table 5 reports ppm values for Al, Cr, Mn, Ni, Ba, and Pb, with As, Cd, and Hg not detected in all three tea preparations. This source supports occurrence context for herbal botanical infusions rather than a broad tea-market benchmark.

Key numbers

Table 5 reports mineral content in ppm for three prepared bael tea samples:

The same table also reports essential/mineral elements including Na 127/133/34.4 ppm, Mg 788/3079/30781 ppm, K 9339/16870/25157 ppm, Ca 1885/7184/5178 ppm, Fe 36.1/1623/380 ppm, Cu 6.9/16.3/19.5 ppm, and Zn 7.2/22.2/25.6 ppm for immature fruit, whole flower, and stamen teas, respectively.

Methods (brief)

The authors prepared tea bags from dried powdered bael whole flowers, stamens, and immature fruits. Mineral content was analyzed with inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The paper does not provide LOD/LOQ values in the extracted text, so the ND values should be treated as source-reported non-detects without a quantified censoring threshold.

Implications

Certification: The source is a botanical-infusion occurrence input for bael-derived herbal teas, especially for Al, Pb, Ba, Cr, Mn, and Ni. It is not a market survey and should not be pooled as representative of all herbal teas without row-fit and geography review.

Courses: Useful as a teaching example that herbal infusion ingredients can differ sharply by plant part: whole flower tea carried much higher Al and Fe than immature fruit tea, while stamen tea carried the highest Mg and K.

App: Supports a low-confidence ingredient/product note for bael herbal tea if that specific botanical appears in an ingredient list; it should not be generalized to all herbal-botanical infusions.

Microbiome: No microbiome findings.

Wiki pages this source may touch

• herbal-botanical-infusions
• tea-infusions
• herbal-botanicals
• tea
• aluminium
• lead
• chromium
• nickel
• cadmium
• arsenic
• mercury
• barium

Verification notes

• The DOI, title, author byline, journal, and year were read from the PDF first page and citation block.
• The source reports As, Cd, and Hg as ND in all three bael tea preparations, but does not expose the non-detect threshold in the extracted pages.
• The paper is a formulation study with three prepared bael tea matrices, not a retail surveillance study.

Page history

The five most recent substantive edits to this page. The full version history lives in git; when DOI minting comes online (see schema docs), each entry below will also link to a version-pinned DataCite DOI.