** Why papaya tea instead of a papain pill? **
At this point, some readers may be convinced of the benefits of papain but are wondering why it's necessary to have to ingest it as tea brewed from papaya leaves. Wouldn't it be simpler to take it in capsule form?
Papain pills, in fact, are readily available. The enzyme is drawn out of the papaya tree by slicing the trunk and draining out the milky sap, which is dried and then made into pills. So why not forget the papaya leaf tea and just take the papain pill?
The reason that I personally believe in using tea made from the natural leaf is that there is more to the leaf than just papain and that the synergistic interaction of papain with other substances in the leaf may substantially contribute to its cancer-fighting and therapeutic properties. As powerful as papain can be by itself, the papaya leaf is also a source of riboflavin, or Vitamin B2, which is required for various cellular processes and plays a key role in energy metabolism, as well as beta carotene, Vitamin E, and potassium - substances that our diet seems to lack in the quantities we really need. (17) While the way enzymes work remains largely a mystery, we do have some clues that to achieve maximum effectiveness, they require the presence of nutritional "accomplices" (such as vitamins), while other substances actually can slow down or stop enzyme functionality (such as sugar and alcohol).