Tea and Longevity

For thousands of years, the native people of China have been enjoying tea as both a beverage and as a medicinal drink. The leaves from the tea plant (Camellia sinensis) can be used to help create internal balance and stability to those who regularly enjoy its brew.

With large amounts of scientific studies being conducted, the health benefits of tea are starting to be understood from a chemical and biological perspective. This research has led to the publishing and posting of several articles, but It can be difficult to separate out which tea is good for which condition because of the volume of information and headlines may at times contradict one another.

At Shang Tea, we certainly realize that tea can be helpful when dealing with many short term issues, but we encourage the incorporation of tea into daily life for the long term benefits that it can bring. In this article we're going to look at tea as a healthy life choice and a great potential help for internal harmony, rather than as a cure for a specific disease.

Tea is often viewed as a tool to relieve short term health issues ranging from colds, the flu, headaches, upset stomach, or as a means to quickly try and have an effect on long term issues such as body fat, cancer, heart disease, or other ailments.

Regular consumption of good, quality tea is important because it is this long term commitment that will help slowly bring your body into balance both physically and mentally, and will slowly allow your body to learn how to utilize all the components of tea, such as antioxidants, anti-inflammatory properties, and vitamins.

The quality of your tea leaves is another important component when talking about drinking tea for both taste and health. Teas that are grown at a higher elevation, in richer soil with higher quality water, and without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers will taste better and make you feel better than teas that are not grown meeting this criteria. Oftentimes the best means to tell the quality of a tea is to feel your body’s reaction to it. For example, if the tea makes your throat dry and scratchy, or if it upsets your stomach, or gives you a headache, then you might want to think twice about continuing to drink that tea—your body is trying to giving you signs that the tea is not having a good impact on you.

While we certainly think the scientific endeavors from around the world have shown that with tea, white tea has the highest levels of antioxidant levels, anti-inflammatory properties, and vitamins, it does not mean you should always drink white tea or continue to drink white tea if you do not enjoy it. Nor does it mean that all grades of white tea are better for you than other categories such as green tea, black tea, etc. For example, lower quality, low elevation white teas that are grown using chemical fertilizers and pesticides will not have the same quality as high mountain, organically grown, high grade green teas. Strive to make contact with those from whom you purchase tea in order to better ensure that the quality and production methods of the tea are top notch.