You Must Drink To This

A cup of tea a day keeps the doctor away. Yes, I borrowed an old saying but the message is literal. It takes that little amount of tea, drinking sustained for a long time, to bring you health benefits.

"The humble tea has awesome powers, much to our delight..."

I am a coffee lover, by the way. But I now drink more tea after knowing the benefits I am going to write about here. I am STILL a coffee lover; I loooooove the taste of all kinds of coffee. Blue Mountain is my personal favorite. A coffee lover who drinks more tea, I am a living testimony that no matter whom you are, it should not get in the way of your health.

Make tea a part of your healthy lifestyle. Much of the negativity surrounding tea owes to its caffeine content. Just like honey, which has health benefits, it has a negative side because of its ‘sugar’. Make tea a simple and available ADDITION. An addition to the other healthy habits you are already practicing. Having said that you just need a cup a day, you need as much as four cups daily to get the risk of cancer significantly reduced.

The family of catechin flavonoids in tea, Epigallocatechin galate, is said to be a more powerful and effective antioxidants than vitamins E and C. This was revealed in a test tube research. In green tea, a laboratory test revealed that it is twenty times more powerful as an antioxidant than vitamin C. In short, the catechins in tea:

• Thwarts cell mutation.
• Neutralizes some carcinogens.
• Reduces the growth of cancerous cells.
• Hampers the growth of blood vessels that tumors need thrive.
• Lowers the especially damaging LDL (bad) cholesterol in animal studies.

As for the caffeine, there is evidence that it has antimutagenic properties linked to having an anticancer effect. It also aids in hampering the development of Parkinson’s disease. People who are sensitive to caffeine can limit tea to early in the day. Alternatively, drink green tea which is generally lower in caffeine. Boiling hot tea or those heavily salted (as in some cultures) can actually encourage cancer.

For those who exercise, boost up your antioxidant before you exercise in the morning by drinking green or black (normal) tea. In about 30 minutes, the favonoids will appear in your blood giving you that boost.

What I like about tea, is its availability. Some people aren’t too bothered with taking specialized health products, organic food and the sort. It takes too much of their time, money and effort. But tea, well, how much time, energy and money does it take to get and drink some. I am not finished with tea yet. More glad tidings in my next revelation.

Eat Like Our Forefathers

If any readers can recall, in one of my previous writings, I talked about buying two books at a crazy low price. One of them is the weight-loss book I was trying to disprove, and failed – I lost weight. The other is about juggling our oh-so-busy daily schedule. I got this one at a fantastic US$ 4.00 (I’m guessing the usual price is about US$ 19.90 – woweee!). Apparently, it was only this last copy which they had trouble selling, lucky me. The rest sold like hotcakes.

In one section of this fantastic book, the author wrote about – you may have guessed it – food. Specifically, food as a stress-reducer. Yes, we all use food to keep ourselves content at one time or another. Oprah Winfrey (hands up, those who don’t know her), together with Bob Greene, an exercise psychologist and fitness trainer, calls it ‘Emotional Eating’ in one of her shows. I am not above and beyond this phenomenon. MANY times, I still do get the urge. One tactic I use is, delay, which I talked about in one of my writings. Incidentally, this tactic is more mentioned in quit smoking tips. Sometimes, in the quest for health, we just need to be creative and try to apply things from across the board. If you find that you are not creative enough, well, this is what blogs such as this one is for – to share information and creativity and apply it to healthy living.

Anyway, I love the simple yet marvelous tips in one half-page section. She titled it ‘Glorious Food’. The author, like us at FoodIsRemedy, believes in the holistic and you will see it in her tips. I particularly liked the tip that says ‘Boycott fast food’. Boycott – nice word to use. I still do eat fast food, though, but only if I’m dead hungry or it has become very inconvenient to interrupt what I am doing to look for ‘slow’ food. Again, you need to be honest when doing this and not mask your ulterior motives with seemingly ‘legitimate’ reasons. If you are serious enough, you would compensate for it by eating more appropriately after that. By the way, if you eat only when you are dead hungry, it’s a sign that you need to tweak your schedule next time. I also acknowledge that sometimes, other people (your job?) who do not give a da*m about health, mess it up for you.

I think I will lose the ‘spirit’ of her writing if I simply reported what she said in her book. I had the honor of getting permission from her just a few days back to reproduce it (Thanks, Jane!). So here is the small but important section in its entirety. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, accomplished journalist and writer, Jane Alexander:

Glorious Food

• Slow food is real food – healthy food. In the time it takes you to heat up a microwave ready meal you could have made a great salad, some warming soup, an omelette or real pasta sauce
• Buy organic food from local producers or subscribe to a weekly organic box.
• Boycott fast food. It’s packed with potentially dangerous chemicals, makes you fat and encourages you to gorge your food, rather than savoring it.
• Eat at a table. Say some form of Grace. [I thoroughly agree with this. It re-focuses eating as receiving with thanks. Not gorging with gluttony.] Concentrate on your food. Don’t distract yourself with books or TV. Chew thoroughly – it will improve your digestion and prevent you piling on pounds.
• Eat together as a family.

I can’t say that I buy into all the tips 100% but generally, it does make good health sense if we can practice the most part of it. In short, eat as our wise forefathers did.