Best teas for Thanksgiving digestion, energy, and post-feast recovery
By this time next week, chances are you’ll just be getting started with Thanksgiving’s day-long celebration of family and friendship, gratitude—and food. Of all the holiday’s signature dishes, one of them resonates as especially apt: stuffing. Because just as cooks pack as much of the bready mainstay as they can into the turkey before cooking it, Thanksgiving participants spend an entire day devouring the holiday’s many offerings. That is—they devote hours to stuffing themselves.
When the people in the kitchen nail the parade of food—the turkey and stuffing, the gravy and mashed potatoes, the cranberry sauce, casseroles and pumpkin pie—few of us regret our descent into wanton engorgement.
Our bodies, however, may quibble with the mind’s decision to jettison regret. Because those plates of rich, salty and sweet foods, along with booze, tax our digestive tracks, and stress our hearts. They propel us toward extreme lethargy. It may take days to recover from the culinary bacchanal.
Here’s one way to boost the body during Thanksgiving: sip tea. The ancient beverage can aid digestion. It stimulates energy—important for getting through the post-meal sloth and working on that jigsaw puzzle with the rest of the group. Some teas, too, ripen serenity—with so much commotion during both the lead-up to the holiday and the feast itself, assistance on the calm front ranks as extremely welcome.
As the big day draws near—a week from today!—now is the time to prepare your poor body for the event that your gleeful mind will savor with abandon for hours.
Teas for Thanksgiving Bodies: Lavender Ginger Refresh (for serenity and digestion)
There’s a difference between tranquility and sloth. One delivers mental clarity just as it helps shoulders sink—tranquility. Experiencing sloth, on the other hand, clouds the mind—it often feels like wet cotton balls stuff our brains. We don’t feel uplifted or positive when we’re sunk in sloth. It often leads to depression, in fact.
How do we feel an hour, even a day, after we’ve polished off another Thanksgiving feast? For many of us, it’s a variation on a theme of sloth. We remain prostrate on couches, TV clicker in hand—sometimes snoring. We’re so beat we can’t even gin-up the energy for half an hour of television vapidity.
Meanwhile, as we flop around the house, our bodies struggle with digestion. It’s just so … much … food.
Let’s give our heads and stomachs a break, with our Lavender Ginger Refresh tea. This caffeine-free dream begins, of course, with lavender—one of the world’s finest calming botanicals. Remember—serenity, not sloth! To that we add a bevy of ingredients that help boost the body’s digestive power: ginger, lemongrass, peppermint, lemon peel, licorice root.
A perfect post-Thanksgiving tea!
Teas for Thanksgiving Bodies: CHA Awake (for energy and digestion)
Here’s a Thanksgiving dynamic duo of a tea. Our CHA Awake, a custom blend developed for the University of Colorado’s Center for Humanities and the Arts, leads with Yunnan Black, a complex melange of delicate sweetness and floral beauty from China’s Yunnan Province. As a black tea, it also delivers energy—caffeine. To this we incorporate our Organic Ripe Pu-erh, which brings both digestive intervention and zip. Pu-erh is the only style of Camellia sinensis that artisans ferment. This process contributes toward pu’erh’s famously complex and intriguing flavors. But it also speaks to the tea’s digestive advantages. As a traditional tea, it also contains caffeine—more vim and vigor! We added orange peel and cinnamon to this blend for intoxicating flavor.
This tea ramps up the zing while simultaneously lending a hand to struggling digestive tracts. Bring it on, Thanksgiving!
Teas for Thanksgiving Bodies: Golden Orchard Oolong (for immunity, energy, digestion)
We like including oolongs with any list of teas designed for complementing meals. The in-between style—not as oxidized as black tea, more oxidized than green and white—offers a wealth of flavors and aromas. It may be the most versatile style of teas in terms of its facility with serving as a winning culinary companion.
The tea hits home with more than just flavor, however. There’s the caffeine, for one thing, which registers as slightly muted in oolong, compared to black. We appreciate the energy nudges, rather than the hard shoves. It’ll put pep in your step without causing you to toss and turn all night.
This tea also contains elderberry, a botanical that naturopathic doctors have leveraged for centuries to bolster immunity. And as you inhale that second serving of whipped cream-slathered apple pie, immunity muscle is a thing you’ll want beefed up. Finally, this delicious blend contains apple, cinnamon, hibiscus, almond, rosehip, currant and aniseed. They all speak to the tea’s wonderful flavor. But the botanicals have other powers. Aniseed empowers digestion—it’s similar to fennel seed, which you often find at Indian restaurants on the way out. In the subcontinent, people wisely chew on fennel to help the meal flow easily through the body. Meanwhile, cinnamon gets tapped by people who want to help regulate blood sugar—which certainly spikes, dramatically so, on Thanksgiving day.
