Beyond Green Tea: Magical Matcha

Who doesn’t love green tea?

Only the most die-hard caffeine-guzzler would sneer at this virtuous drink. Everyone from doctors to yoga teachers tout this mellow brew’s health benefits – and not just because it’s lower in caffeine than the typical cup of coffee.

In the pantheon of healthy foods, tea is one of the most widely-studied substances on Earth, due to its remarkably high antioxidant content: 8 to 10 times the levels in typical fruits and vegetables! Tea also possesses fairly unusual types of antioxidants with unique effects, including thearubigins, epicatechins, and catechins (including the super-powerful antioxidant EGCG).

Countless experiments on humans and animals have demonstrated that tea can prevent toxins from damaging our DNA – which explains why lab rats and lab humans who regularly drink tea are less likely to get cancer.

Tea’s benefits don’t stop there.   People who drink two or more cups of tea a day tend to have healthier cardiovascular systems, with less heart disease and lower “bad” LDL cholesterol levels. Studies even suggest benefits in the areas of diabetes, fat metabolism, allergies, skeletal strength, skin health, and neural longevity.

The funny thing about “tea” is that few people actually consume the plant itself, choosing instead to drink the brew and throw away the leaves. But a thousand years ago the Chinese innovated a technique for powdering tea leaves and drinking them like a magical, stimulating soup. This process traveled to Japan and flourished within Zen monastaries, where this powdered tea – known as Matcha – was revered for both its stimulating and relaxing qualities.

Stimulating and relaxing? Unlike brewed tea, Matcha tea contains all the nutrients, amino acids, and fiber of the whole leaf.   Although this makes Matcha much higher in caffeine (equivalent to about a cup of coffee), the caffeine is assimilated very differently, binding to the catechin antioxidants and entering the bloodstream more sustainably, over the course of several hours. Not only that, one of the major components of the whole Matcha tea leaf is the amino acid L-Theanine, which has powerful relaxing effects on the nervous system, leading to an overall state of alertness, clarity, and long-lasting calm energy.