Pair These 3 Delicious Detox Teas with the Holiday Season
Just two weeks from today, many of us will spend the morning and afternoon mashing potatoes, savoring the aroma of roasting turkey, splashing gravy on stuffing, and feasting.
Then comes the five-week waltz toward New Year’s Day, complete with holiday parties, mountains of cookies and midnight toasts of Prosecco.
We tend to neglect our bodies during the holiday season. Too much butter and sugar, wine and eggnog. Not enough exercise — shopping doesn’t count.
When January arrives, we make resolutions to return to running, to cut back on the meat and potatoes, to swap glasses of seltzer water for pints of beer. But we think the detox can begin much earlier — in fact, we all can detox even as we have yet another slice of pumpkin pie or Buche de Noel.
It’s easy. Just drink tea all season long.
When the traditional tea plant, Camelllia sinensis, is brewed the beverage contains myriad plant compounds that help the body maintain health and heal. In addition, many herbal teas offer potent detoxifying ingredients. If we all sip tea across November and December, by the time 2022 arrives our bodies may still need extra attention. But at least they have received the tea treatment.
May the holiday season begin! And may we decorate it with hot mugs of tea.
Detox Tea: Golden Memory Ripe Puerh Cake
While all Camellia sinensis can help the body detox, one style, puerh, is especially suited for health. Puerh and similar “dark” teas undergo fermentation; no other tea styles are fermented. In China, people sip puerh to improve health, as well as to enjoy its complex, beautiful flavors.
Many puerhs, like this Golden Memory Puerh, get formed into cakes and aged before being packaged and sold. And then the tea lovers who buy them often put them aside for further aging. As these fermented teas age, the flavors grow increasingly interesting.
Tea artisans in China’s Yunnan Province are famed for their puerhs. Our Golden Memory comes from the hand of tea master Mr. Zhou Bin Liang, from Menghai County in Yunnan. It brews dark, clean and rich, with flavors reminiscent of toasted grains. The mouth-feel is smooth and multi-layered. Golden Memory possesses outstanding Hui Gan, or sweet aftertaste.
Detox Tea: Organic DetoxiTea
Many plants are powerful detox vectors. One of them, dandelions, is used worldwide to help bring bodies back into healthy balance. Scan the supplements shelves in markets that carry a lot of herbal products, and you’ll find loads of products filled with dandelion — often dandelion root, the part of the plant with the highest concentration of detoxifying compounds.
In addition to a wealth of dandelion root, our Organic DetoxiTea contains cinnamon, which also helps cleanse the body. Honeybush, a shrub quite similar to rooibos that grows in South Africa, serves as the tea’s foundation. Honeybush is rich in polyphenols, which are antioxidants that help the body mitigate and manage inflammation. Finally, DetoxiTea contains lapacho, a South American bush that people in South America brew into tea to optimize health.
Detox Tea: Organic Sunrise Chai
In India, chai simply means tea, a derivative of cha, the Chinese word for tea. But most tea in India is crafted into the style of beverage we call chai around the world: a base of tea spiked with spices and herbs, sweetened, and cut with milk.
What’s not to love about chai? We appreciate that it’s not just one recipe — India supports hundreds of styles of the delicious beverage. Ku Cha carries 11 different chais, from traditional Bombay Chai to decidedly alternative Rooibos Chai.
All of them offer detox advantages. But Sunrise Chai is our most detox-forward chai, thanks largely to the root that gives the tea its orange color — turmeric. The primary active ingredient in turmeric, curcumin, is packed with antioxidants, which are essential for fighting inflammation. People across India and Southern Asia incorporate turmeric root into traditional medicine protocols, using it treat a variety of conditions.
This blend, which rests on a foundation of organic black tea, also contains ginger, which like turmeric is flooded with inflammation-fighting antioxidants. The rest of the blend — cinnamon, clove, cardamom, fennel, black pepper and cayenne pepper — offers beautiful flavors as well as health-boosting plant compounds.
Holidays, we are glad that you are nearly upon us. We look forward to breaking out the cookie sheets, dusting off the turkey baster, and testing eggnog recipes.
And all along, we will complement our holiday pursuits with healthy tea.
