By Sasha Moedt (The Cascade)– Email
Print Edition: September 25, 2013
I am an amateur green tea addict.
The friendship of coffee left a bad taste in my mouth (quite literally), and regular black tea … Well, my dentist looked in my mouth and said, “Aha! We have a tea drinker!” I guess dark tea stains teeth. Point taken. He also made a comment about popcorn, but there’s no way I’m giving that up.
So I started drinking green tea, and I did some reading up on it. According to Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, in his book, Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life, drinking green tea a few times a day does wonders as a body detoxifier. Green tea contains polyphenols called catechins, notably one called—now try to say this one aloud—epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Yeah, I couldn’t either. Now, EGCG is one of the most powerful nutritional molecules against the development of new blood vessels by cancer cells. Black tea doesn’t have it because it’s destroyed in the fermentation process needed to make black tea.
The David’s Tea website tells me that green tea is, after water, the number one most consumed drink on the planet! Want to get in on this?
There are a few basic things I didn’t realize when I first started making it. I was very turned off because of the heavy, bitter taste. But you can avoid bitterness in the preparation of your tea.
Make sure you steep the tea in hot but not boiling water – that’s what made my tea so bitter at first. Steep it for a good eight minutes to get all the good stuff (or, whatever that word is. Epi-something). Add some sweetener – sugar doesn’t feel right for green tea, but I’m a big sweet tooth. Try agave nectar or stevia (recommended by Servan-Schreiber as substitutes to sugar) or honey, though make sure it’s unpasteurized. Pasteurized honey is honey that’s been put through a heating process. This process kills all the nutrients in honey – its enzymatic components. Drink the tea within the hour, because the beneficial catechins diminish over time.
Finally, if it’s still not tasting up to par, make sure you’re getting the good stuff. There are many different brands, some really good, and some awful. It’s not a great deal if you buy the cheap stuff but never drink it because it’s so terrible. I like to go organic loose leaf, or it feels like I’m drinking steeped pesticides. For that I go to David’s Tea, but for bagged Superstore tea, I reluctantly buy the Kirkland or Lipton brand.
There are tons of varieties of green tea to experiment with. For Chinese tea, the most popular are jasmine, dragonwell, or silver needle. Japan’s most popular are sencha, gyokuro and matcha. There are various blends, flavourings and brands, and of course not only Japanese and Chinese.
Point is, you have a lot of tea tasting to do. Now go get your daily dose of epigallocatechin gallate!
