papaya leaf tea

[honu]

I had been running across claims of health benefits for papaya leaf tea for awhile and recently tried making it. The tea wasn't bad (herb tea or tisane, depending on which terms one likes); it tasted a little like pumpkin, in between raw pumpkin and the toasted seeds flavor, or one version more like roasted tomato.

Does anyone have experience with drinking such tea, or more to add about those health claims? I'm not sure what to make of that part. Maybe it is really healthy but once people start claiming a tea can help cure cancer that sounds a bit off. Another claim is that it can help cure dengue fever, but who knows, maybe, or maybe not at all.

I wrote a blog post about making it, but really drying it any way one could think of would work. Roasting it a little (pan-frying, as I did, or heating in an oven on low heat, which I also used for the drying step) would change the flavor, but any form of drying would turn fresh leaves into an herb tea / tisane.

I tried to oxidize the tea later (make it more like a black tea, not really covered in the blog post), but that didn't change much, so in a sense it didn't work. That blog post about making it, with some related links:

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.com/2016/02/tisane-experiments-papaya-leaf-and.html

Here is one article making a lot of claims about health benefits, but again I'd be skeptical of those. Note that not a single reference is cited to support the claims, so essentially it's presented as hearsay, and once people ask questions in the comments the author emphasizes it's not intended as medical advice:

http://community.omtimes.com/profiles/blogs/15-uses-for-papaya-leaves-a-powerful-cure-for-cancer