Would You Like Some Tea?
/If you are a fan of British Films or TV, you know the Brits love their tea. In fact, it is estimated that approximately 165 million cups of tea is consumed daily by people in the UK! That is a lot of tea.
Do you know how tea was discovered?
The short answer is: Nobody really knows. But, according to Teavana, there is a legend that dates back to 2737 BC indicating that a Chinese Emperor discovered the concept of drinking tea. It used to be drank for medicinal purposes before it was drank for pleasure. I don’t like to quote legends so I am going to stick to the first authentic mention of tea. The Encyclopedia American made reference to tea in relation to a Chinese official who died in 273 C.E. So, in reality, no one has any record of when prior to 273 B.C.E tea was first discovered. Meaning, to me at least, this business of drinking tea could have been discovered by dinosaurs and we wouldn’t know it.
What is clear though is, tea goes back a very very long time. Thanks to export and globalized travel, tea was transported from place to place. The Dutch took tea to Java in 1826, and the British, took tea to India in about 1836 (surprising eh, I thought it was the other way around). Then, in the 1870’s, when a fungus killed Sri Lanka’s coffee trees, tea bushes were used as replacements. And some other person took it to Kenya... you get the drift.
Today, so many good health benefits have been discovered to result from Tea. For example did you know that tea can be a good anti-viral medicine?
Preliminary lab studies show that “a wide variety of commercial teas appear to either inactivate or kill viruses,” reports Reuters Health Information. Several types of green and black teas, regular and iced, were tested on animal tissues infected with such viruses as herpes simplex 1 and 2 and the T1 (bacterial) virus. According to researcher Dr. Milton Schiffenbauer of Pace University in New York, “iced tea or regular tea does destroy or inactivate the [herpes] virus within a few minutes.” Similar results were obtained with the T1 virus. While it is not yet clear how tea interferes with the survival of these viruses, researchers found that even after substantially diluting the tea, it was still effective. Blacktea was found to have a somewhat more potent antiviral effect than green tea.
The next time you are getting a cold sore on your lips, look inside your kitchen cabinet for the cure.
How many different varieties of tea are available today?
The UK Tea & Infusion panel estimates that there are approximately 1,500 different varieties of tea today. Green, Black, White, Yellow varieties... Yikes. That is a lot of variety.
Redrose, Lipton, Tetley, roasted tea, bubble, with or without sugar, whichever brand of tea and however you prefer to enjoy it, think about how many more variety of tea are there for you to discover!
Food for thought. What is more Blended! than that?
