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Valley Wellness
Drinking Tea for Health
By Cathy Embrey
The earliest recorded information about tea is in the book, "Shennong
Ben Cao Jing" from the Chinese Han Dynasty. Shennong is known as the god of agriculture and inventor of Chinese
medicine. Hot tea was considered more valuable than liquor. It wasn't until the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904
that iced tea became a popular beverage.
That is a 3,000-year timeline. So what is it we are drinking, is it all really tea, and is it really healthy?
There are two types of tea. We derive black, green, white and oolong teas from Camellia Sinensis, an evergreen
tea tree. Herbal teas, known as Tisane, are infusion beverages made with herbs, flowers, roots and other plant
parts.
That's right, herbal teas are not tea.
The location of the leaf on the camellia tree determines whether it is white, green or black tea. White tea is
the delicate silver-grey portion at the top of the plant. Green tea leaves are next on the tree and below them
are the black tea leaves. White and green tea once harvested is not oxidized or rolled, but simply withered and
lightly dried. Tea contains antioxidants and polyphenols vital for wellness.
Black and oolong teas are prepared with a fermentation process that makes the color dark and develops a rich aroma.
This extended process destroys some of the polyphenols that make white and green tea more beneficial. Besides having
no calories, tea ranks as high, or higher than many fruits and vegetables in the ORAC score. Oxygen Radical Absorbance
Capacity (ORAC) is a test-tube analysis of food that measures antioxidant strength to eliminate oxygen free radicals.
The higher the ORAC score, the better a food item is believed to fight disease.
Herbal teas for medicinal use may involve the advice of an herbalist or health-care provider. Herbal tea remedies
include peppermint tea for sour stomach, chamomile tea for a restful night's sleep and echinacea tea to fortify
the immune system against the common cold. However, peppermint tea should be avoided by acid reflux sufferers,
echinacea should not be taken daily for extended periods of time, and some chamomile is combined with pineapple
bark which causes allergic reactions in some people. Do your homework before investing in quantities of herbal
tea. The good news is that most herbal teas are naturally caffeine-free.
There are two ways to decaffeinate tea from the camellia tree. One uses the solvent ethyl acetate, destroying about
70 percent of the polyphenols. The preferred natural process is effervescence, which causes a 5 percent reduction
in polyphenols. Moistened tea leaves are put under heat and pressure and exposed to carbon dioxide gas. The carbon
dioxide mixes with the caffeine, and when it is released to the atmosphere, it takes the caffeine with it.
To substantially decaffeinate a teabag, use two cups of hot water. Dunk the tea bag for 30 to 45 seconds in one
cup, then place the bag in the second cup and steep to taste. Do not drink the first cup of tea, which contains
about 80 percent of the caffeine originally found in the tea. The hotter the water, and the longer the tea is steeped,
the more caffeine is released from the leaf. This is a good trick to know when dining out.
Green tea has approximately 65 percent less caffeine, and white tea has about 75 percent less caffeine than black
tea. According to the American Dietetic Association, black tea has about 40 mg. of caffeine, as compared to 85
mg. in a fresh-brewed cup of coffee.
As reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association in Sept. 2006, researchers from Tohoku University
in Japan followed 400,000 participants aged 40 to 79 for 11 years. They found that participants who drank five
cups or more of green tea daily had a death rate from heart disease 26 percent lower than the control group in
the first seven years of the study. In Sweden, researchers followed 60,000 women ages 40 to 76 for 15 years and
found that women who drank more than two cups of tea daily lowered their ovarian cancer risk 46 percent, as reported
in the Archive of Internal Medicine in December 2005.
White tea can be cost-prohibitive for daily use in the average home. Less expensive green tea has a bitter taste
to some. Organically processed tea provides a sweeter, clear green liquor enjoyable to most palates. To add green
tea to your daily regimen try these ideas: use green tea to reconstitute orange juice and canned soups, steam vegetables
with tea and use the water as a soup broth, or drink a refreshing and healthful Japanese beverage, iced green tea
mixed with pineapple juice and coconut milk. |
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