My Fourth Baby Step: Green Tea (February 15th - 21st)

Since the weather outside is frightful, I thought I would add something warm and delightful this week. Green tea. Green tea has a ridiculous number of health benefits. It can:

1. Lower your risk of dying from all causes (okay, not all causes. it won’t prevent a bus from hitting you but it will lower your risk of dying from health-related issues).
2. Decrease your risk of developing lung, breast, stomach, esophageal, prostate, ovarian, pancreatic, and colorectal cancer.
3. Help your heart.
4. Increase fat burn (the caffeinated variety has a more pronounced effect on weight loss than the decaffeinated variety).
5. Lower your bad cholesterol.
6. Lower your risk of getting simple bacterial and viral infections.
7. Keep your bones strong.
8. Protect your liver from damage caused by alcohol.
9. Increase your endurance.                                       
10. Keep your brain sharp.
11. Help you get over the flu.                                        
12. Prevent allergies.
13. Help if you have Parkinson’s disease.
14. Relieve stress and fatigue.
15. Delay signs of aging.
16. Do your taxes (okay, that's the guy at the local tea shop's joke). 

This is a loooong list, but if it doesn’t convince you to drink green tea every day, maybe this will.

That green tea can dramatically improve your health is the good news. That it is better to drink more, rather than less, to maximize these benefits is the bad news. While some benefits come with drinking as few as two cups a day, you can only get all of the benefits listed above from drinking 3 to 5 cups (or more). That’s a lot of green tea!

Since it is hard to have 5+ cups of tea a day if you don’t have all day to sit around making and sipping, I have decided to get creative. I am adding green tea instead of water to my morning “green smoothie” so that I get in an automatic 1-2 cups of green tea in the morning. I experimented and it doesn’t change the taste if you just cool down the green tea a bit first with a couple of ice cubes. I didn’t think “green smoothies” could get more healthy but it turns out, they can. I am also going to take iced green tea “to go” instead of water when I can. Just make the tea and pour it over ice. Lastly, I will supplement my green tea intake with green tea KitKats (see below and just kidding).
 
Tips:

1.  Drinking green tea in conjunction with black pepper has been shown to increase your body’s absorption of the good stuff in green tea, so have your tea with a black pepper rich meal when you can.
2. It doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot (health-wise) whether loose-leaf or bagged tea is used. The argument for loose-leaf tea is that it’s cheaper, fresher, less-caffeinated, and better tasting than bagged tea. The argument for bagged tea is that it is easier to buy and brew.