Enjoy tea’s surprising health benefits — without the microplastics

Look, I’m British, so I think you know what I’m going to say about tea.

Tea is great. Tea is delicious. I drink tea every day, just like my father and my mother and their fathers and their mothers and so on, back hundreds of years to when tea first started being imported to Britain from India and became our national beverage of choice.

Put a food-grade-plastic tea bag in near-boiling water, and it rapidly starts to disintegrate and you’ve got a cuppa that’s more plastic soup than tea.

Tea made Britain great. It made the British Empire, and it was the cause — or the proximal cause, anyway — of the great falling-out between Britain and its thirteen colonies, so I guess we can say tea made America great too.

Besides being a nice thing to drink, tea has all sorts of health benefits. Here are three that may surprise you.

1. Tea makes you lose weight

Japanese researchers have shown that an extract of tea catechins with caffeine significantly increases energy expenditure by causing changes to brown fat cells.

There are actually two types of fat: white and brown. Brown fat is a more metabolically active type that’s involved in maintaining body temperature. Think of brown fat cells as little furnaces, if you will, that burn energy to keep the body warm. So by cranking up these furnaces, in a manner that’s similar to the effects of consuming chiles or taking a cold dip, the catechins in tea will increase your total energy expenditure. That means you can eat more and not put on weight, or you can lose weight more easily. Cool, huh?

2. Green tea helps you build muscle

There’s quite a lot of research demonstrating the anabolic effects of green tea; these include studies of bodybuilders, trained athletes, and elderly people. A Brazilian study of women who undertook a weight-loss regimen showed that those who combined weight training with green tea increased their strength the most and also increased their muscle mass the most.

How? It’s been suggested that the phenols in green tea inhibit the enzymes that remove testosterone from the blood, meaning more testosterone remains there for longer. But there are probably other mechanisms at work too. Drinking green tea before exercise may boost the concentration of adrenaline in the body, which could help to improve the quality of the workout.

3. Drinking tea helps you live longer

A large-scale population study of 100,000 Chinese adults showed that drinking three cups of tea a week — in this case, green tea again — reduced the risk of death by a whopping 15% over a period of seven years. The researchers estimated that drinking tea could add an average of 1.26 years to the life of a 50-year-old tea drinker. The researchers attribute these effects to the phenols in the tea — again — which may have a protective effect on blood vessels.

You could quite literally spend all day reading studies about the health benefits of drinking tea. If you’d like to do that, here’s a link to one of my favorite websites, which has a whole archive of tea studies.

So the moral of this story is, clearly, drink tea.

Hold the plastic

But not so fast. Before you go and brew a cup or a pot, there are some problems with drinking tea that you need to be aware of. Here’s a really big one: plastics. Or rather, it’s a big problem that takes a very small form: microplastics.

If you drink tea made with tea bags rather than loose-leaf tea, as most people do, you’re almost certainly ingesting large quantities of microplastics, and that’s not something you want to do if you can help it.

Microplastics are a serious emerging health threat, and new research is linking them to pretty much every known chronic disease, from Alzheimer’s and autism to heart disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Microplastics accumulate in all the organs of the body: the liver, the heart, the eyes, the sexual organs, the brain. It’s been suggested that we swallow a credit card’s worth of plastic a week (5g) and inhale the same amount too.

RELATED: Study finds microplastics in every single human and canine testicle: ‘The plastic makes a difference’

BSIP/UIG via Getty Images

What’s in your bag?

The microplastics in tea don’t just come from the water or the kettle (if it’s plastic); they also come from the tea bag itself. A significant proportion of tea bags are now either made of plastic — the tea bag is actually plastic — or contain plastic, usually in the glue that holds it together. A study of six tea brands in the U.K. revealed that four included polypropylene and one was made entirely of nylon.

Food-grade plastics deteriorate significantly at temperatures above 40 degrees centigrade. Put a food-grade-plastic tea bag in near-boiling water, and it rapidly starts to disintegrate and you’ve got a cuppa that’s more plastic soup than tea.

A 2019 study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that a cup of tea produced by one plastic tea bag contained 11.6 billion — billion — microplastic pieces and 3.1 billion nanoplastic pieces. Nanoplastics are probably even worse than microplastics, because they’re smaller, which means they can get into places microplastics can’t inside the body.

One way to cut out the plastics is to avoid tea bags altogether, but it’s not particularly convenient — and who wants to deal with strainers and cleaning up the soggy leaves afterward? I certainly don’t.

Kindred spirit

Thankfully, there’s a solution that doesn’t mean abandoning those handy little pouches. It’s Kindred Harvest, a brand I’m proud to have founded myself, because I don’t want a mouthful of plastic either. Our tea products are organic (so no nasty pesticides); they’re independently tested for heavy-metal content (many teas are heavily contaminated with lead and other toxic metals); and best of all, they’re packaged in 100% plastic-free tea bags.

Kindred Harvest offers 10 different blends, with everything from black and green tea to vanilla chai, cinnamon apple, and hibiscus flower.

Kindred Harvest

My personal favorite is the Sleep Tea mix, made with chamomile, lemongrass, spearmint, and lavender. If you’ve been paying attention to these articles over the last month or so, you’ll know that sleep is a seriously underappreciated aspect of good health. Men who double their sleep can double their testosterone, for example. When I have a nice hot cup of that chamomile blend, I know that when my head hits my perfect Woolshire organic virgin-wool pillow, I’ll be counting sheep in no time.

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Visit kindredharvest.co.