Drinking tea can boost your health
: Fit to a tea
February 22, 2005
Go ahead, swill that cup of Joe. Just remember this:
Coffee may seem like an exciting playmate, but good
old-fashioned tea will be a lifelong friend —
and help your health.
That’s right. Tea is increasingly being recommended
as a disease fighter, used to counter cancer, heart
congestion, tooth decay, stroke and weight issues, says
Sharon Johnson, who teaches nutrition classes for the
Oregon State University Extension Service. In January,
she led a workshop at Providence Medford Medical Center
about the health benefits of tea.
"If you drink three cups of tea a day, it’s
the same, in terms of antioxidant and antibacterial
effect on your body, as eating six apples," says
Johnson. "In tests on rodents, tea is proven to
have incredible health benefits. And it’s popular
in most of the world, not America, because it stimulates
without rattling you or causing insomnia."
Tea fanciers such as Johnson all seem ready to steep
the rest of us in the health lore of the world’s
most popular drink after water. While herbal teas offer
symptomatic help — echinacea for colds, St. John’s
Wort for depression or comfrey for insomnia —
only real tea is touted as a broad-spectrum health drink,
a distinction that’s bringing on a significant
increase in popularity.
"Sales are going up considerably," says tea
buyer Sanya Brown of the Ashland Food Co-op. "Our
buyers are extremely well-educated and are hearing more
and more about how black and green teas lower cholesterol
and blood pressure, suppress viral activity, dilate
bronchial tubes and work against colon, intestinal and
rectal cancer."
These claims are backed up by studies, says Johnson.
Heavy tea drinkers (more than 20 cups a day) have a
44 percent lower death rate from heart disease, while
drinkers of more than 14 cups a week have a 28 percent
lower rate.
In studies in Holland, strokes were much less likely
and less severe in people who drank even a cup and a
half of black tea a day. Studies in Japan showed a one-third
drop in lung cancer and a 60 percent decline in stomach
cancer among those who drank even small amounts of tea.
All this goes back to the antioxidants in the camellia
sinensis plant, from which tea is made. Health experts
believe the antioxidants protect against heart disease,
stroke and cancer by limiting damage from free radicals
— molecules naturally produced in cell division,
but which become dangerous when exacerbated by sunlight,
toxins and smoking, says Johnson.
Black tea has less than half the caffeine of coffee
and produces a calm, balanced lift, with a sense of
increased mental clarity but none of the nervous, manic
"wired" feeling of coffee, fanciers say. Green
tea is the raw plant, not fermented like black tea,
and has almost no caffeine.
Coffee drinkers, who often express passion for their
brew, may be inclined to ask, if tea is so good for
you, why isn’t coffee? It just isn’t. It
may have a few vitamins but it makes no health claims
and, being a diuretic, can’t be said to hydrate
you, says Johnson.
Still, says the Co-op’s Brown, "Coffee is
my first love."
"I love my cup or two of coffee in the morning,"
agrees Johnson, "but I drink only tea after that."
In addition to the health and addiction questions,
people are "tuning into the karma of coffee,"
says Elizabeth Bretko of Heartsong Herbal Brewing Co.
in Jacksonville, a maker of chai, becoming more aware
of how much clear-cut land and third-world labor is
required to grow it for billions of java junkies.
"Coffee is fun occasionally," allows Bretko,
"but it has long-term bad effects like dehydration
and stripping vitamins and minerals out of your body."
Tea, on the other hand, can be counted as part of those
eight glasses of water we’re always told to drink
each day, says Johnson.
And, in contrast to coffee, says Brendan Girard, co-owner
of EcoTeas in Ashland, tea "requires you to slow
down, heat the water, steep the tea. It’s a healthful
act that makes us take time out, which in this fast-pace
culture is a health benefit in itself."
"It’s an art and it’s no accident
the Japanese have made a tea ceremony around it,"
says Johnson, who was surprised to have 100 students
pre-register for the hospital’s tea workshop.
"People have a love affair with their tea, and
many even brought their beloved tea pot to show off."
How is the art of tea done? You use loose tea, not
bags, which contain the lower quality parts of the plant,
says Bretko. You put in one heaping teaspoon per person
"and one for the pot."
You steep well to bring out the flavonoids (antioxidants),
then strain, sit back and drink a toast to your health.
Source:www.mailtribune.com
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