Iced Green Tea For A Longer Life

According to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association you can decrease your risk of an early death due to cardiovascular disease by 22 percent by drinking five cups of green tea a day. Since more people die of this disease than any other reason this alone should be enough reason to drink more of this beverage as it obviously promotes longer, healthier lives.

Green Tea Versus Coffee

Now, I’m a huge coffee drinker and I don’t think I’ll be making a full time switch over to green tea in the mornings but there’s nothing to say that I can’t have it later in the day and in iced form. After all, why drink it hot when it’s just fine cold?

For a while now I’ve known that I don’t drink the amount of water that I should. I get my water predominantly in the form of foods, broths, and other drinks. Of course these are not as ideal as drinking it "straight up" but a nice iced green tea is pretty close in my book. It has no calories like coffee and even the caffeine content is not that bad, only a third of that of coffee.

In the evenings and weekends I often find myself lounging around the house wondering what to sip on. Often coffee seems wrong because I’ve already had half a pot in the morning already, beer or wine seems to over the top as it might not be something I want to do all day long, water by itself seems to bland sometimes, and soda is obviously a death trap.

In situations like these I can imagine that a nice iced, unsweetened, green tea would be a fine beverage to sip on all afternoon. Not only does it provide an unbelievable amount of antioxidants and promote heart health but it is bitter yet refreshing, two things I love in a drink but find hard to merge together aside from coffee.

My Recommendation

I recently did some shopping for green tea bags and good recopies to make iced green tea and came up with the following organic decaf tea bags from Bigelow Organics: Bigelow Organic Green Tea. This pack of 240 can make approximately 24 gallons of iced green tea and thus should last even the most avid drinker for quite while. Of course you could also run down to Walmart and find a generic brand pack of green tea bags for cheaper but hey; we live in an organic society these days. It's better for you.

How I Make Iced Green Tea

Anyway most people are into hot tea and from what I read from others some are savage about it. "You can't drink it cold!" Whatever, I'll drink it cold and we'll see if it makes me worse off; somehow I doubt it. Anything's better after all then drinking coke for dinner and this is no different. From what I've read you can just pour a gallon or so of water into a jug and drop in 10 or so tea bags and maybe a few lemon slices and just let it sit there for a few hours. Works for me.

Comments on the subject are appreciated, and thanks for reading. Live long!

Info Source
Journal of the American Medical Association

Photo Credit
Rob Ireton via Flickr

Type-2 Diabetes And Coffee

Is Coffee Bad for People with Type-2 Diabetes?

Monica over at NutritionData posted the other day about a new study that was published in the journal Diabetes Care, June 2009 which concluded that people who were suffering from Type-2 Diabetes had nothing to worry about when it came to drinking daily coffee.

For some time there has been inconsistent information on whether or not the caffeine in coffee causes blood sugar spikes. Monica writes:

"Drinking coffee before or with breakfast can lead to a much higher rise in blood sugar than breakfast without the coffee"

This study however shows that despite normal blood sugar spikes, the long-term effect of caffeine on the diabetic is nill. The researchers showed that drinking four or more cups of coffee per day made no difference to overall mortality rates, early death, and cardiovascular diseases in diabetic men were not affected by the caffeine.

Thumbs Up For Diabetes And Coffee
This is good news for all in my opinion. Though I am not a diabetic man, I am a heavy coffee drinker. Of course I take mine black which keeps the calorie and fat content to near nill, but it is still good news because as this finding suggests caffeine doesn’t increase the threat level for those who have diabetes already then it is unlikely to cause disease in those who do not have type-2 diabetes. Caffeine has been shown to increase metabolic rate and increase the burning of fat stores in the body due to it’s stimulation of lipolysis, the breaking down of fat stored in fat cells.

For this reason alone it seems to me to be more indicative of life sustaining effects to diabetics due to their increased tendency to be overweight, however the study do not show conclusive evidence that mortality was effected significantly in any way.

Let's all go out for coffee, huh? Thanks to Monica for pointing this out!

Also, click through for more information on how to lower insulin levels and the relationship between diabetes and testosterone and if you like what you're reading I would also like to invite you to subscribe to my feed and read what I have planned for publication in the days ahead. Thanks for reading!

Source
NutritionData - http://blog.nutritiondata.com/ndblog/2009/06/good-news-for-diabetic-coffee-lovers.html
Diabetes Care - http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/32/6/1043.abstract
Journal of Nutritional Sciences and Vitaminology - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=11508705&query_hl=1