Ilex Vomitoria Ait. (Yaupon): A Native North American Source
of a Caffeinated and Antioxidant-Rich Tea
1
M
ATTHEW
J. P
ALUMBO
*
,2
,S
TEPHEN
T. T
ALCOTT
3
,
AND
F
RANCIS
E. P
UTZ
2
2
Department of Botany, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611, USA
3
Department of Nutrition and Food Science, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843,
USA
*Corresponding author; e-mail: mattjp@ufl.edu
Ilex Vomitoria Ait. (Yaupon): A Native North American Source of a Caffeinated and Antio-
xidant-Rich Tea. Yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria Ait.) is a caffeine-containing shrub native to
the southeastern United States where its leaves and twigs were traditionally used to prepare a
stimulating and healthful beverage by Amerindians and more recent colonists. For a variety of
mostly socioeconomic and cultural reasons, widespread consumption of yaupon tea ceased
by the late 19th century, but the species is widely used in ornamental horticulture. Given the
environmental damage associated with other caffeine crops, we believe that disuse of this
species is unfortunate, and we report on traits that consumers may consider valuable. We
found that total foliar biomass, caffeine, and antioxidant production all increased with nitr-
ogen fertilization in one common ornamental yaupon cultivar, ‘Nana.’ Increasing light avai-
lability was associated with increased antioxidant activity but not with the decreased caffeine
production predicted by the carbon/nutrient balance hypothesis for secondary metabolite
production. We also found the highest caffeine concentrations in another yaupon cultivar,
‘Pendula,’ but suggest that the wide range of chemical variation offered by wild-type yaupon
populations renders them more suitable as sources for the development of high caffeine-
producing varieties. The results of this study suggest that yaupon is a viable caffeine altern-
ative for North Americans living within its range on the southeastern coastal plain.
Key Words: Carbon/nutrient balance hypothesis, cassina, phenolics.
Introduction
Caffeine, the world’s most frequently con-
sumed psychoactive substance (Weinberg and
Bealer 2001), has huge socioeconomic and
ecological impacts. For example, when produc-
tion of sun-grown coffee in Southeast Asia
increased in the 1990s, the coffee commodity
market plunged (Perfecto and Armbrecht 2003).
This “global coffee crisis” triggered a positive
feedback whereby more forest was cleared for
coffee production, which threatened endangered
Sumatran tigers, elephants, and rhinoceroses
(O’Brien and Kinnaird 2003). Although some
solutions to this conservation problem have been
offered (Dietsch et al. 2004;O’Brien and
Kinnaird 2003), we suggest that local sources of
caffeine should be used to reduce pressure on
forests in areas of high conservation value. In
North America, for example, consumers might
consider replacing coffee with yaupon holly (Ilex
vomitoria Ait.) for their stimulating morning
beverage. In this paper we examine several issues
associated with the production of yaupon, a
caffeine-containing shrub that was once well
known to tea drinkers across its native range in
the southeastern United States and beyond.
Consumption of a tea made from yaupon began
with the indigenous peoples who extolled its
stimulating and healthful properties. Amerindians
brewed leaves and twigs of yaupon holly into a
caffeine-containing beverage, the consumption of
which figured prominently in their social and
mythological constructs (Hudson 1995). For ex-
ample, imbibing of yaupon tea by Muscogulges,
Economic Botany, 63(2), 2009, pp. 130–137.
© 2009, by The New York Botanical Garden Press, Bronx, NY 10458-5126 U.S.A.
1
Received 22 February 2009; accepted 24 Febru-
ary 2009Recieved 10 July 2009; accepted 18 January
1
Recieved 10 July 2009; accepted 18 January
2008; published online 19 March 2009.