Articles Search Engine

Time and again I am asked which is the best green tea drink. I’m well aware of the various types which include Matcha, White Tea, Sencha, Gyokuro, Sencha Red, and others.

I am often tempted to say that the best one is the one you drink consistently – but that would be incorrect.

I say that because I always think of excellent tea when I think of drinking tea.

Because this beverage is a relatively new experience here in the United States, people have yet to learn a number of key distinctions between buying what is readily available – and something which will actually gives them the green tea benefits they’re really looking for.

Make no mistake about it, the difference between quality green tea and 95% of the tea that consumers are using is literally night and day.

The best green tea drink is ‘young’

Scientists and nutritionists tell us that for your tea to actually deliver its world-famous benefits it should be consumed within six to eight months of the tea leaf coming off the plant.

After being harvested, well-known, ‘household’ brands only get to the supermarket shelves after numerous stops. From the warehouse in Asia, it’s loaded onto cargo ships which lumber across the Pacific. Once it makes it to a distributor’s warehouse it eventually gets shipped to the manufacturer’s processing plant, then to another warehouse, then to the supermarket’s warehouse, and finally to your Grocer’s shelf.

Unfortunately, the vast majority being consumed here is far older than six to eight months. This means the vast majority of it’s nutritional benefits have already been lost so it’s not even close to being the best green tea drink.

Bottled Tea is certainly not the best green tea drink either

I used to drink a bottled version that everyone is familiar with. That was until I was set straight from a Japanese woman whose family owns a 600-year-old tea farm. Once I learned what real green tea was all about I went back and studied my ‘New Mexico’ tea brand and got pissed off.

What I discovered was that instead of doing something healthy for my body the tea I was consuming was actually doing more harm than good.

Aside from all the ‘extra’ ingredients which had been included to sweeten its taste and to extend its shelf life for the next millennium – I learned that it also been pasteurized which further removed much of the remaining nutritional value.

The vast majority of people drinking this beverage seemed to be either using it as a weight loss tool or for its world-famous nutritional and cancer fighting properties.

These folks typically think that those amazing properties are available in the tea products manufactured by these ‘house-hold’ brand names they are buying just because the label says ‘Green Tea’. It’s sad to say but more often than not, the additives and sweeteners used in these name brands are actually adding to their health problems…

It’s not until people gain a little education on what genuine high quality green tea is all about that they have a chance to use your common sense in your tea buying decisions.

Here are a few things to look for in buying and preparing the best green tea drink.

* Seek out sources which are natural – preferably from Japan (Dr. Mercola, a very well known American osteopathic physician and nutritional expert, warns his clients to stay away from tea coming from Pakistan, India, and China).
* Determine the amount of time it took to get your tea from the farmer’s field to your kitchen cabinet (the fresher the tea the better it is for you).
* Consider drinking one that has been stone ground into a power form (with powdered tea you are consuming the whole tea leaf and getting far more nutrition than from a tea bag or even loose leaf tea).

I used to believe that the best green tea drink was the one that tasted the sweetest or was the one most convenient to find – I’ve learned a lot since then and I’m healthier for it.