Green Tea Folklore and Healing

No one really knows for sure when tea drinking started, one popular Chinese legend suggests that an emperor called Shennong was responsible. He also seems to have been responsible for inventing traditional Chinese Medicine too! Clever chap, if it's true. Apparently, he had a bit of a thing for tasting plants (and probably animals too) and whenever he came across something toxic that made him ill he would take tea! There is also a similar legend about a Chinese deity - just versions of the same legend I suppose ... but whilst tea is not really a miracle cure as described in these legends, it is potentially a healthy drink.

Why's that?

Tea leaves contain many natural chemicals, some of which are known to have powerful antioxidant properties. These can help the body deal with bad chemicals called 'free radicals' which are known to cause harm damaging the heart and linked to cancer. Antioxidants can alter free radicals and render them int a form that is no longer harmful.

There are plenty of other foodstuffs around that contain antioxidants so tea should form just a part of your daily healthy diet. Studies have been done and suggest that you would need to drink a lot of tea to supply the body with a usefully high antioxidant concentration. A study in Japan (sorry, I don't have the reference now) suggested that people who drank at least 7 cups of green tea per day may well have less chance of developing cancer. Sadly, the report was fairly arbitrary and just looked at a few people in a certain village - as with all health related studies, it is impossibly difficult to carry out a controlled experiment and the numbers involved are inevitably too small to make it scientifically valid.

So green and oolong teas may not be the 'silver bullet' that will ensure long life and good health, as claimed by many marketers (are they cynical or do they not realise that these stidies are not particularly scientific?) and sellers of tea ...but they do taste good and may just contribute in some small way to your healthy lifestyle.

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