Treat Your Beating Heart to Healthy Tea for Love’s Big Holiday
Love’s only holiday bewitches us with its efflorescence of aromatic blossoms, its adoration of chocolate, its passion for compassion, affection and romance. While other holidays urge us to honor historical events or religious ceremonies, Valentine’s Day fixes on the most powerful and universal force for good in the world: love.
Given the holiday’s saturation of heart imagery — confections, cards, emojis, garlands and much more — it also persuades us to consider the muscle thumping every moment behind our rib cages.
Even though hearts do not literally swell and warm when we sink into love, it sure feels like it. Maybe that’s because our hearts are deeply in touch with all that is going on in our bodies. When the stuff of romance moves us, our hearts give us supporting hugs.
Let’s return the hugs. Our hearts depend on us for their health. Exercise and lowering stress help our hearts, and so does diet — that includes sipping tea.
Yes, tea satisfies our taste buds, warms our bodies, helps bring about calm and provides energy. Plant compounds in tea also head straight to the heart, where they offer strength and support.
Tea and Heart Health
Scientists have long studied tea for its health effects. As the most widely consumed beverage on the planet, researchers for decades have wondered whether tea was beneficial — or not — for human health.
The verdict has been in for a long time — tea is healthy. But new studies continue to reveal more about tea’s healthy properties.
For example, a 2020 report of a large study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology found that regular tea imbibers who sipped more than three cups of tea a week had a 20% lower risk of heart attack and a 22% lower risk for dying of heart disease. The study analyzed data for 100,000 Chinese for more than seven years.
Another recent study of 80,000 people from the Kailuan community of Tangshan, China during a six-year span found that age-related decreases in the good cholesterol, HDL, slowed down among tea drinkers. That decline in HDL diminishment lead an 8 percent decrease in cardiovascular risk among the tea sippers.
Cholesterol plays an important role in heart disease. We want less of the bad cholesterol, LDL, and more of the good.
More? Sure.
As detailed in a Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers studied more than 40,000 Japanese adults and found that people who drank more than five cups of green tea a day experienced a 26% lower risk of death from a heart attack or stroke.
There you have it, tea lovers. Drink your favorite beverage for its delicate aromas, its complex flavors and for the good of your heart.
Heart-Healthy Teas: Organic Sweet Heart Blend
This caffeine-free blend turns to herbs that practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) have leveraged for centuries to bolster hearts: in particular, hibiscus and rose buds.
Studies have shown that hibiscus may lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol levels. In addition, the flower’s naturally elevated levels of Vitamin C can help boost the immune system and inhibit free radicals from causing cell damage — both of which are good for the heart.
Rose petals and buds are packed with antioxidants, compounds that fight cell-mangling free radicals. Most of the antioxidants found in rose are polyphenols, plant-based organic compounds that are thought to reduce the risk of several conditions, including heart disease. One study of rose tea found that polyphenol content and antioxidant activity equaled and possibly even surpassed the same in green tea.
Our scrumptious Organic Sweet Heart Blend also contains peppermint and licorice root, both of which contribute toward health — including improved digestion — while introducing beautiful flavors.
Heart Healthy Teas: Spring in Paris
As we explored earlier, Camellia sinensis in general, be it black, green, oolong, white or pu-erh, nurtures the beating muscle in our chests that massage our spirits when we sink into love.
We trust all of you have tried black tea. But have you ever sipped a cup of black tea spangled with freeze-dried strawberry and pink peppercorns? Unless you brewed our custom Spring in Paris blend before, chances are you have never experienced the combination.
Now is the time! The black tea performs the heart magic, while the strawberries balance the tea’s robustness with whispers of spring fruit and the pink peppercorns — which are not related to traditional black and white peppercorns, but instead are kin to the cashew tree — add peppery zing and bite.
Heart-Healthy Teas: Organic Rooibos Provence
Stress management. Immunity enhancement. Antioxidant development. Heart advancement. This tea’s got it all. Oh, and our Organic Rooibos Provence is also flavor triumphant!
Rooibos, the South African shrub that people across the country — and increasingly around the world — brew into tea is famously full of electrolytes, which are minerals that serve as free-radical warriors in the human body. The plant’s abundance of electrolytes helps bolster heart fitness.
Meanwhile, elderberry is used around the world for immunity boosting, rosehips and petals are loaded polyphenols (as we discussed in the Sweet Heart Blend section) and naturopathic doctors use lavender to ratchet-down stress. As we know, stress leads to many heart problems.
This tantalizing elixir, which we often sip iced during summer, is heart balm.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Frolic in love. Smell those roses, and savor those chocolates. And treat your heart to tea on the big day, as well as across the year.
