Archive for the ‘health benefits’ Category

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tea will cure everything…all of it


2012
03.07

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Posted in health benefits | 11 Comments »

There are two sorts of teabloggers in the world. Those who mindlessly regurgitate the purported health benefits of tea, and those who scoff.

Ok, that’s a bit of a simplification. I know. And it’s not fair for me to disparage every single person who writes about this, because there are health benefits. And that’s likely one of the things that first attracts many people to tea. That or peer pressure. For example, you live in a tea-drinking culture, and you simply want to fit in. Sounds like an above-average culture to me.

But the thing that sticks in my craw is the ridiculously over-the-top claims that are made. ‘This tea will not just cure your inoperable cancer, but miraculously make your mother-in-law adore you’. Although those are exaggerations, the things I regularly read that tea can cure or prevent are wildly speculative.

Let me just say again: I know tea drinking can be good for you. Some of the things can be empirically proven, and the others are written in a way that you can’t exactly disprove them. ‘This tea might very well make all your dreams come true’. That sort of thing.

So imagine my delight when I found a list of the medical benefits of tea, while reading Alan & Iris MacFarlane‘s The Empire of Tea recently. Translated from a Chinese source by Member of Parliament T. Povey in 1686, here are all of the things this magical elixir that we call tea can do for you:

  1. It purifyes the Bloud of that which is grosse and Heavy.
  2. It Vanquisheth heavy Dreames.
  3. It Easeth the brain of heavy Damps.
  4. Easeth and cureth giddinesse and Paines in the Heade. 
  5. Prevents the Dropsie.
  6. Drieth Moist humours in the Heade.
  7. Consumes Rawnesse.
  8. Opens Obstructions.
  9. Cleares the Sight.
  10. Clenseth and Purifieth adults humours and a hot Liver.
  11. Purifieth defects of the Bladder and Kiddneys.
  12. Vanquisheth Superfluous Sleep.
  13. Drives away dissines, makes one Nimble and Valient. 
  14. Encourageth the heart and Drives away feare. 
  15. Drives away all Paines of the Collick which proceed from Wind.
  16. Strengthens the Inward parts and Prevents Consumptions.
  17. Strengthens the Memory.
  18. Sharpens the Will and Quickens the Understanding.
  19. Purges Safely the Gaul.
  20. Strengthens the use of due benevolence.

Wow. Maybe I was wrong about this tea stuff. All that sounds wonderful. If one drinks tea, he’ll have no medical-related problems again. Right?

Let’s start with number 1: This is good, right? Who doesn’t want purified blood? Is blood gross and heavy? Well, I suppose it is. I haven’t weighed mine. Not lately, anyway.
2. Vanquishing heavy dreams is good. No-one wants heavy dreams. Just remember: have a little tea right before bed, and you’ll have only fluffy and light dreams. Not too much, though. One thing drinking a lot of tea will undoubtedly do for you is make you need to make frequent trips to the toilet.
3. I have no idea about this one. Is your brain weighed down by over-sized Damps? What on earth is a Damp? Can’t imagine that it’s all that good.
4. This one says it takes away headaches, which is good, but do you really want to be cured of being giddy? I’m not sure I want it eased. I’m so rarely giddy. I want it to last as long as possible.
5. Dropsy? I had to do a search to find out what this might be, and it appears it’s only something which afflicts fish. Here: if your fish have come down with it, you can go to Dealing With Dropsy to solve all your Dropsy-related problems. If you’re a human with Dropsy, you need only drink tea.
6. What is it with people and their moist heads? Really. Were earlier people so dehydrated? I’m glad tea will solve that. Thank you, tea.
7. This one is most appreciated. Rawness needs to be consumed. Cooking things is over-rated. We should all really embrace the consumption of raw things. Or rawness in general.
8. The way I see it, obstructions are begging to be opened. It’s the natural order of things. It is, isn’t it? You build an obstruction, and something or someone is going to do his damnedest to break it down. In this case, that thing will be the power of tea.
9. Tea will make blind people see once more? That’s good news, isn’t it?
10-11. What’s an adult humour? And a hot liver? They don’t sound good. The same goes for defects of the bladder and kidneys.
12. I don’t think I want my superfluous sleep vanquished. I get very little of that. I’d like more, actually.
13. Nimble and valiant…and no longer dizzy. This’ll be good news for some dizzy people I know. If any of you want a bit more nobility and/or valiance in your life, you might consider drinking more tea.
14. If you drink tea, you’ll no longer be afraid. Those fears will be driven away, if they’ve not been driven away already. Enjoy a fearless life from here on out.
15. Ok, the wind-produced colic? They’re talking about flatulence here. Maybe I’m not drinking enough tea. I drink a lot of tea, but this affliction has yet to have been cleared up. One can still hope, right?
16. Inward parts…wait a minute. This one could be taken so many ways. I think my inward parts are plenty strong, but because there’s mention of consumption…well, I suppose it means something different. I saw La Boheme. I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the consumption.
17. Tea does a lot of things, but memory strengthening isn’t one of them. At least not in my case. Maybe I’m drinking the wrong tea.
18. My will is rather sharp, but I wouldn’t mind a bit quicker understanding. This is like the memory improvement. It’s not getting better because of tea drinking. If anything age has slowed my understanding.
19. My mother had Gall Bladder surgery when I was a little boy, and from what she said, it hurt like hell. Just think: if she’d drunk a lot more tea, no need for surgery. At this point, you’re probably relieved that I have nothing to do with the medical profession.
20. Finally, my very favourite one. And I quote: ‘Strengthens the use of due benevolence’. I like to parse sentences, and this is a wonderful opportunity. We’re not talking about improving all benevolence. Only the earned sort. The ‘due’ benevolence. That means if I deem you don’t deserve it, my benevolence for you is non-existent. Nada. Niente.
So, what have we learned here? That tea will cure everything…all of it. What I was talking about at the beginning of this post was misguided. The truth is that any time someone touts the health benefits of tea, you should believe them whole-heartedly. Dreams coming true and all.
You can tell them I said so.
6 comments

fasting tea – herbs that clean you from within


2012
01.15

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Posted in diet, health benefits | 6 Comments »

the green balloon is a symbol – what’ll happen to the green ballon?

Let me start out with two very weighty disclaimers. I’m writing about products that market themselves as tea, but have absolutely nothing to do with the Camellia sinensis plant. They call it ‘fasting tea‘ and although I’m aware that plenty of you will take issue with the terminology, I’m just not prepared to go through the entire post and keep writing ‘fasting tisane‘.

The other thing is that I have no personal experience with any of these products. I don’t drink tea to enhance my fasting. You’d immediately be able to tell from my less-than-svelte appearance that I haven’t fasted in years (if ever).

Why am I writing about it then? I saw something about fasting tea in a complimentary magazine called Schrott&Korn, which you find in many healthfood stores in Germany. Typically when I see something tea-related in my daily life, I make some sort of attempt to incorporate it here. Before I go on about it, here’s the original article:

Here’s another disclaimer. ‘Jeez, there are a lot of those so early into this,’ you say? Actually, I think this is important enough to make quite a bit of noise about it. The health benefits that are claimed tea drinking will bring you are often laughable and sometimes even downright deceptive. So much so, that I spend half of any post I write on this subject stating and restating that I’m neither a medical doctor nor scientifically versed enough to verify any of the things upon which I’m reporting. You’ve been warned.
The first point the article makes is that the fasting tea is only going to be as good as its ingredients, which is nearly too obvious for me to repeat. Yet the point that’s made is that when you’re fasting, your body is particularly vulnerable to products that might’ve either been grown with pesticides or handled in someother improper way. Apparently, the herbs shouldn’t be fumigated or irradiated either. 
As a rule, Germans take this sort of thing rather seriously. Not sure wherever you are in the world that you’d even know if they’d been doing these things to products, but here…here, this sort of thing is checked quite carefully.
What’s the result of herbs in tea?
According to the article if your intention is to purify and detoxify your system, then it’s your liver, gall bladder and kidneys that need the most attention. What ingredients do the most for those organs? The usual suspects that are in many fasting teas are: stinging nettle, birch leaves, and juniper berries.
Now, remember: Am I a doctor? No. Am I recommending that you go stock up on stinging nettle, birch leaves, and juniper berries? I most certainly am not. Just telling you what I’ve read.
Dandelion is a diuretic and Milk Thistle is helpful in liver regeneration (it’s the Flavonol Silymarin that does it, but I assure you there’ll be no test at the end of this). Who didn’t know all that? (I didn’t)
Elder berries take away the inflammation and decreases sweating, while (pepper)mint will calm your upset stomach and make your digestion more regular (actually, I knew that last one).
In the rhythm of a day; typical fasting herbs
From my understanding, you should be avoiding coffee or true tea (you know, anything coming from the above-mentioned Camellia sinensis plant) if you’re doing a proper fast. For some reason, that’s why so many fasting teas have Mate in them.
There’s both caffeine and Theobromine in the Mate, and I’m only just now realising that Mate needs it’s own post. There are plenty of people out there in the tea world talking about Mate, and I’m sure none of you can forget Lisa Galaviz‘s trip to Teavana in How NOT to go to a Tea Shop, where she came back with Mate and I insisted you Don’t tell her it’s not tea.
But the real point of this whole post was to come round to talking about stingingnettle. 
If you didn’t bother clicking over to that Wikipedia link, there’s a very humourous bit about Competitive Eating in which they describe:
In the UK, an annual StingingNettle Eating Championship draws thousands of people to Dorset, where competitors attempt to eat as much of the raw plant as possible. Competitors are given 60 cm (20 in) stalks of the plant, from which they strip the leaves and eat them. Whoever strips and eats the most stinging nettle leaves in a fixed time is the winner. The competition dates back to 1986, when two neighbouring farmers attempted to settle a dispute about which had the worst infestation of nettles.

Doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun?
So stinging nettle is a very curious plant to me. Again, thanks to Wikipedia I know that it’s a dioecious herbaceous perennial. Really? A perennial? How lovely. 
There’re few things I’d rather avoid when I’m out in nature in the summer than stinging nettle, but I’ve often heard that it’s not just nutritious when cooked, but used in many alternative health remedies. Specifically in a fasting tea. ‘Oh, are we back to that?’ you ask. 
Well, yes. That was the original point of all this, wasn’t it? 

The article itself made quite a bit of noise about a brand of fasting tea that you probably can’t even find anyway, unless you’re in Germany. Purportedly, the five different sorts they offer are created for either the specific time of day or a unique aspect of fasting. To my eyes, it looks like clever marketing, but I’m not going to advertise the brand here. You can go to the link if you’re really curious.

Would I recommend you use either this or any other product to aid whatever fast you might endeavour to take part in? I would NOT. I’m only passing on the information as I found it. 

Do I think you should have a Competitive Eating contest in which you consume stinging nettle? Now that is something I can stand behind whole-heartedly. 

remember the green balloon? that’s all the bad stuff you get rid of when fasting



14 comments

The Prison and the Cult of Tea


2011
12.19

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Posted in health benefits, pondering, tea ceremony, Uncategorized | 14 Comments »

Not sure exactly what I can say about the death of Vaclav Havel, but I do try to keep this blog topical. What on earth does that have to do with tea? Well, I’ll let him explain it in his own words (translated of course-I don’t speak Czech, do you?) Here’s what the late playwright had to say about drinking of the leaf:

‘When I was outside, I didn’t understand the cult of tea that exists in prison, but I wasn’t here long before grasping its significance and succumbing to it myself. . . . Tea, it seems to me, becomes a kind of material symbol of freedom here: (a) it is in effect the only fare that one can prepare oneself, and thus freely: when and how I make it is entirely up to me. In the preparation of it, I realize myself as a free being, as it were, capable of looking after myself. (b) Tea – as a sign of private relaxation, of a brief pause in the midst of the hubbub, of rumination and private contemplation – functions as the external, material attribute of a certain unbridling of the spirit and thus as a companion in moments of focused inner freedom. (c) The world of freedom considered as leisure time is represented by tea in the opposite – in the extroverted and therefore the social – sense: sitting down to a cup of tea here is a substitute for the world of bars, wine rooms, parties, binges, social life, in other words again, something you choose yourself and in which you realize your freedom in social terms. . . . I drink it every day. . . . I look forward to it, and consuming it (which I schedule carefully, so it does not become a formless and random activity) is an extremely important component in my daily ”self-care” program. From ”Letters to Olga.” ‘

(source: The New York Times 8 May 1998 from an article by Michael Scammel called The Prison and the Cult of Tea)
It turns out that this is referenced multiple places on the web, but I found it thanks to Thomas Kaspar, whose a member of the Facebook group ‘Teefreunde‘. He has an intriguing teablog Siam Teas, which if you’re not careful, you might lose an inordinate amount of time perusing.
7 comments

Is tea bad for you?


2011
04.16

Posted in green tea, health benefits, Oolong | 7 Comments »

Had a ton of great responses to my horror story about my kettle from a few days ago. Thanks for all of that. It really is fulfilling to entertain.

So two things happened this week that got me off on another tangent, and somehow I think this’ll be appreciated here. Rather than work my way up to it, I’ll ask the question here at the outset:

Is tea bad for you?

We often hear about how green tea can cure cancer or halitosis or Tourette’s. For every potential life-saving property that’s attributed to tea-drinking, there’s someone else out there insisting that the science doesn’t back up the claims. I’m glad there are people arguing this, but I’m really out of my depth when any of these topics come up.

My response, when the topic of health benefits of tea arises, is to very clearly say that I really don’t know. I love drinking the stuff. If there are additional advantages, then I’m all the happier.

But what if all this tea I’m drinking is actually detrimental? Ooh, now this might get interesting.

My friend Art has had some rather monumental health issues that’ve led him to assess everything he’s always thought about nutrition and diet. Anytime he sends me anything, I take it seriously. Partly out of solidarity for him and his struggles. Partly because he finds good stuff. When he locates anything tea-related, I know it’s coming my way.

So the blogpost he sent me is from Lindsey “Vee” Goodwin of Vee Tea and it’s all about Tea and Iron. It might be two and a half years old, but it seems like all of this still stands. Let me be perfectly clear: she does not say that tea’s bad for you.

She does however talk about the effect of the tannins in tea on both anemic and vegetarians, and recommends that those people drink less tea or avoid the black or highly-oxidised Oolong tea that have a lot of tannins. Please don’t take any of this from me. Go click on the link, and read what she has to say about it.

She does ask at one point, “You want me to drink LESS tea and plan my meals around my tea-drinking! You must be crazy!” So I wanted to throw this out as a hypothetical:

What if you found out drinking too much tea was, in fact, bad for you? Would it impact your tea drinking in the least? I write quite a bit about black tea. Would I be willing to alter which tea I drink for the sake of my health?

The other thing that happened was much more frivolous. My dentist informed me that it was very self-evident that I was a heavy tea drinker. She said it as if it was an admonition, but I glowed with pride. It’s just cosmetic, isn’t it? What would you sacrifice for the sake of tea?

But she did convince me to lay off the black tea for the rest of the day. Might sound like it’s not much of an inconvenience. I have plenty of really nice Oolong and green tea, but once my black tea was off-limits…it wasn’t a pretty sight.