A healthy life with good tea #1

My first tea class about health is online! This is a new subject I will develop and illustrate once a month. 

 First, you may wonder why should I speak about health? I started to give an answer in this article. A body in good health is the foundation for achieving our goals in life. Increasing lifespans is a good thing, but a long life isn't necessarily a healthy life. Modern times have made food more abundant and, at the same time, physical work less necessary (thanks to machines, cars, appliances...). These developments explain a trend to obesity, which many doctors say causes diabetes, liver and heart diseases as well as many cancers. My father was a family doctor and has retired a couple of years ago. According to him, the largest culprit of unhealthy diets for most of his patients is sugar (and bread, noodles)! This is a problem, because our taste buds were trained for thousands of years to measure the sweetness of food as an indicator of its quality. For instance, an apple tastes sour when it's too young, sweet when it's perfect and foul, fermented or rotten when it's turning old. Likewise, a pleasing scent has also long been associated with a comestible food. So, sugar and flavors additives in industrial food have screwed up our judgement. We crave food that is sweetened and nicely flavored, which is causing us to overeat. And this causes obesity, which triggers long term diseases. In 2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity in adults was 42.4% in the US. So, fighting obesity is a fight for a healthy life. 

Second, what is the relationship between health and tea? We often read that tea is a healthy beverage that contains wonderful molecules, but I don't believe in miracles. You are what you eat, so the best way to be healthy is to eat and drink healthy most of the time. I don't believe that you can eat unhealthily and erase the effects of bad food with a cup of tea (or some pills). However, it's been my experience that tea can help to retrain our taste buds to recognize natural and healthy aromas and to enjoy them. The key is in finding pleasure in natural, unsweetened food and the best way to start is to brew high quality tea, without sugar! If you consider the cost to your health, I am certain that it's more effective to pay more for naturally mellow and delicious tea than to save a little on cheap tea that requires the addition of sugar and maybe artificial flavors, to taste good. And as you learn to appreciate natural tea, you will retrain you sense of taste. By learning to identify artificial flavors and added sugar, you will get a better appreciation of natural tastes and grow a dislike for artificial flavors. 

In the next 'health life and good tea' classes, I will teach several ways to regain control of our sense of taste, so that we don't get fooled by processed food anymore. I will also teach ways to reduce the sugar in your food consumption. Food and tea pairing is one of the tools we are going to use. The focus on good tea is also important, because the shift from processed food to natural, unsweetened food must be based on pleasure and not a sense of loss or regret. Similarly, another benefit of tea appreciation is the motivation to stop smoking, because smoking reduces the sensitivity of one's palate. That's why there are fewer smokers among tea drinkers than among the general population.

Here's the full video of the class: