The Forgotten Health Benefit of Tea

One day, a few thousand years ago, China’s emperor Shen Nong was out doing research for his great encyclopedia of medicine, eating every herb he encountered in the forest and recording the results.  On this fateful day, he ate something deathly poisonous.  The world began to go dark when the breeze lifted a few tea leaves to his face.  Recognizing fate at work, he took them and ate them, recovering immediately.  Or so goes the story.  From this day on, tea has been known as a medicine.  Modern studies recognize the powerful antioxidants at work in the tea plant, giving many Americans a powerful motivation to make tea a part of their day.

Yet, the most powerful health benefit of tea is completely overlooked by modern science: tea asks of us a few moments out of our day to prepare and appreciate it.  This means that we are forced by our daily ritual to relax and recover, forced to take time to think about what we have achieved and what we wish to achieve.  Twenty minutes of daily relaxation is just as critical to our physical health as twenty minutes of daily exercise if it manages to keep our stress levels in check.

Around the world, cultures have developed unique tea ceremonies.  In China, the ceremony is so important to daily life that it survived the turmoil of war, famine, and revolution in the 20th century.  Despite the push to modernize, traditional ceremony is as strong as ever.  The Mandarin word for the act of preparing tea can translate to “free time.”  This idea of enforced leisure is embodied in the thimble-sized cups used to sip the tea.

In Japan, tea has become a kind of religion.  In Okakura Kakuzo’s landmark piece, The Book of Tea, he describes teaism as “QUOTE.”  Some of us might dismiss this “adoration of beauty as a healing method as something unfounded and abstract, but modern scientific studies directly link happiness, stress and physical health.  Finding an easy and pleasurable ceremony to add to your day will not only provide the antioxidant healing power of tea, but also the psychological benefits of Kakuzo’s teaism.