India has a great deal of iron deficiency and a great deal of tea, and the two are more related than most people realise.
Tea is rich in tannins, which bind to iron in the gut and prevent it from being absorbed. Studies have found that a cup of tea with a meal can reduce absorption of non-heme iron — the kind found in plant foods — by anywhere from 50% to over 60%. Coffee does something similar, and so does calcium from milk.
This matters most for vegetarians, because plant iron is harder to absorb to begin with. You can eat a respectable amount of palak, rajma and jaggery and absorb remarkably little of the iron in it if the tea arrives alongside.
What to do, without giving up chai:
1. Leave a gap. An hour before or after a meal is largely fine. The problem is tea with the meal.
2. Add vitamin C to iron-rich meals. It does the opposite of tannin — lemon over dal, tomato in the sabzi, or an orange afterwards can multiply absorption several times over.
3. Cook acidic foods in an iron kadhai. It genuinely adds usable iron, and this is well documented.
Nobody needs to stop drinking chai. It just should not be sitting next to the dal.
