Tea & Health
Many people will tell you that tea has health benefits because of some chemicals that are embedded in the leaves and released during infusion.
At Far Leaves Tea we believe that taking time out from a busy day to wait for water to boil will reduce the stress in your life.
Drinking hot, purified water frequently will help energize and clean out your system.
Enjoying the subtle flavors and fragrances of tea will lift your spirits and extend the quality of your life.
Enjoying the simple things in life and sharing with other people will bring happiness and joy.
But, if you care about the "scientific" reasons for tea's healthful reputation, here's what people are finding.
Tea is abundant in the antioxidant called epigallocatechin gallate (ECGC). It's chock full of polyphenolic antioxidant plant metabolites called catechins. Not to mention flavonoid substances, amino acids like Ltheanine, theaflavins, and zins, fluoride, and folic acid.
So what? These ingredients do things like: help prevent cancer and heart disease; raise thermogenesis (the rate at wich calories are burned); help the body's immune system response when fighting infection; increase alpha wave production in the brain (which is associated with a state of "alert relaxation"); decreases production of the beta-amyloid protein thought to play a key role in the development of Alzheimer's symptoms; and it can protect against free radicals-which sounds like a bad idea here in Berkeley, but it's actually good for the body. Not only that, but it's zero calories.
But still, just drink tea and enjoy quality of life!
About Organics and Tea from China
We often get asked about the quality of our tea coming from the environmental disaster that is so prevalent in China today. We totally share your concerns and take every step we can to ensure that our tea comes from the most organic conditions as possible in China. Our buyer has been visiting China yearly for over 15 years to develop relationships with farmers and brokers that we can trust. We get official looking certificates of organic-ness, but we take that for what's it's worth and our buyer tries to visit the farms and regions where we source our teas to inspect fields and warehouses as much as possible. A final step we like to take is buying spring teas which are generally more likely to be pesticide free since the bugs they spray for don't come until later in the year when the leaves are more mature.
All of that is no guarantee unfortunately, and without lab testing of each tea it's impossible to say for sure what environmental elements got into the crops of tea we import. If you love green teas and want to be more sure about organic farming methodologies, you may want to consider Japanese green teas. We've been getting ours for 15 years from the same traditional farm in the far south of Japan (opposite end from Fukushima) and have every reason to believe these craftsmen would never pollute their high quality tea with chemicals.
Also, all the ingredients in our herbal infusions come from reliably certified North American and European sources.