New Wellness Tea Box Makes It Easy to Spark Health
Wellness isn’t a destination. It’s a journey. The voyage incorporates a broad diversity of pursuits, from regular checkups with physicians to exercise, practicing mindfulness, spending time in nature and plenty more.
Diet, of course, plays a key role in wellness. A daily parade of cheeseburgers, French fries, soda and ice cream will not help ripen wellness. In fact, eating like that will stand as a stout barrier toward achieving a healthy body and mind.
We champion sipping tea as a powerful dietary engine for bringing about mental clarity and serenity, emotional calm and physical vigor. Wellness in a cup! Any healthy diet should include at least some tea.
Tea can provide energy and focus, without the scattered thinking and jitters that can come with beverages packed (rather than perfumed) with caffeine. Tea can mitigate anxiety, and manage stress. It can stimulate appetite and also ratchet back our desires for food. Tea offers cardiovascular benefits, digestion advantages and congestion solutions. It also helps the body wrestle with, and weaken, the inflammation that leads to so many health problems.
It’s not a panacea—no amount of tea will fortify a body abused by daily pulled pork sandwiches and root beer floats. But we trust that tea serves as a potent wellness booster; for people at least trying to invite wellness practices into their lives, we think tea is a welcome partner.
Introducing Ku Cha’s Wellness Tea Box
To this end we have created our new Wellness Tea Box, a curated sampling of six teas that we think support a healthy lifestyle and wellness journey. A big bonus—they taste wonderful! In addition, each box contains a guide that outlines some of the health benefits of each of the teas.
Green and herbal teas experience the most widespread praise for their health benefits. Their emergence as health tonics is well-deserved, and we include them in the Wellness Tea Box. But the places where tea and vitality intersect extend beyond these two categories. Oolong and puerh tea—both of which are represented in the Box—offer profound health benefits, too.
While the box doesn’t contain any black or white teas, we are devoting our blogs and newsletters across March and April to wellness teas. And we will explore the many health gifts of black and white teas in upcoming coverage.
This Sunday, we spring forward our clocks an hour for daylight savings time. Nine days later, on March 19, the spring equinox arrives and the winter of 2023-2024 reaches its official end. Days grow longer. We spend more time outside, hiking on trails, riding our bikes, hanging out in parks. Meanwhile, many of the plants that improve our lives—from towering oak trees to chicory flowers to grasses—begin broadcasting pollen.
Now is the time to buttress and strengthen our health—to prepare for the coming months of pleasing activity!
Wellness Tea Box: Organic Chrysanthemum Green
This powerhouse features a quartet of ingredients—Japanese sencha green tea, peppermint, chrysanthemum and rose petals. All of them contribute toward health optimization, but we’ll focus on two: green tea and chrysanthemum.
In an upcoming post we will dive deep into the health benefits of green tea. But in summary, we can say with confidence that the scientific research—and there’s been a wealth of it—backs up assertions that green tea promotes health.
Among other things, courtesy of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health:
- Mental alertness
- Digestive symptoms and headaches
- Weight loss
- Heart disease and cancer protection
As for chrysanthemum, the flowers are native to East Asia, and used extensively by practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Chrysanthemum, for example, contains a wallop of potassium, which helps the heart, kidneys and other organs—especially lungs—function properly. Potassium also can mitigate risks of conditions like high blood pressure, digestive disorders, arthritis, stroke and cancer.
The plant also contains a healthy jolt of iron, which is important for growth and is an important partner for carrying oxygen through the blood.
In TCM, practitioners urge patients to sip chrysanthemum tea to help lower blood pressure—and modern research supports the claim. It’s also suggested for help with lung conditions.
Wellness Profile:
Lung support, cold and flu, vision health
Wellness Tea Box: Osmanthus Oolong
One of the keys to traditional Camellia sinensis tea and health hinges on antioxidants. These powerful compounds inhibit oxidation in the body. By doing so, they mitigate the body’s volume of free radicals. Nobody celebrates their body’s free radicals: These unstable atoms damage cells, leading to illness and some of the pitfalls of aging.
While green, white, oolong, black and puerh teas share many of the same antioxidants, research reveals that oolong teas offer stronger antioxidant effects than black and green styles. So make sure to add oolong tea to your daily or weekly regimen! It won’t be a burden—oolong tea is delicious, and comprises a huge diversity of styles. We will explore the many health benefits of oolong in more detail in an upcoming blog.
This fantastic tea also contains osmanthus flowers, which add lovely perfume and flavor to the brew. Practitioners of TCM widely turn to osmanthus for a welter of health benefits, including curbing appetite, dispelling phlegm and refreshing breath.
Wellness Profile: Curbing appetite, bone & teeth health, weight loss
Wellness Tea Box: Tangerine puerh ball
Among the main styles of Camellia sinensis, puerh probably ranks as the most obscure. The majority of production is limited to mountainous (and beautiful) Yunnan Province, with Taiwan also embracing puerh with gusto. Demand among tea lovers has sent puerh around the globe, but it remains somewhat scarce. That is starting to change, however. As the main style of fermented tea in the world, puerh broadcasts uniquely earthy and complex flavors. And that fermentation also yields health benefits.
We will analyze puerh’s many wellness advantages in an upcoming blog. Among its health benefits: improved digestion, improved breathing and diminished chest congestion, and weight loss.
This style of puerh, from Xin Hui in coastal Guangdong Province, brews into sublime elixir, a drink that captivates with flavors of forest floor, mushroom and walnuts. It’s also stuffed into a dried tangerine ball, which imparts a light citrusy sweetness to the brewed tea.
Wellness Profile: Cholesterol, diabetic support, detox, dispelling phlegm, spleen health
Wellness Tea Box: Balance Tea
Like TCM, Ayurvedic medicine has been practiced by people, beginning in India, for thousands of years. The time-tested approach toward wellness includes yoga, massage, acupuncture and herbal medicine, and leans into a variety of different botanicals to bring about health.
Our Balance Tea rests on an Ayurvedic foundation, based on its ingredients: cinnamon, cardamom, licorice root, coriander, fennel, ginger root and rose. The blend aims to boost “dosha pitta,” the Ayurvedic humor governing digestion and metabolism. In addition, warm cinnamon—widely used to support healthy blood sugar—and ginger also provide excellent support for joint health.
Wellness Profile: Metabolism, digestion, joint health
Wellness Tea Box: Organic ImmuniTea
No self-respecting wellness tea box could skip rooibos, the South African shrub that people in the country brew into tea and sip daily—and with abandon. We adore rooibos’s earthy, herbal flavor and champion its health properties. It is a primary ingredient in our popular ImmuniTea.
Rooibos’s supports human health in a variety of ways, including its balance of electrolytes, the minerals that the body uses to fight those pesky free radicals that we referenced in the section on Osmanthus Oolong. The heavy dose of electrolytes in rooibos also helps quench thirst; sip this tea, and you’ll notice your desire for liquids will diminish a bit. Athletes love drinking rooibos before, during and after workouts and competitions.
Gut this tea is about more than just rooibos. It also contains marshmallow, which reduces inflammation, soothes muscle pain and is a detoxing tonic for kidney health. The echinacea in the blend—like the rooibos—helps reduce free radicals. The ginkgo leaf promotes blood circulation and heart health, which explains its characterization as a “youthful” herb. And finally the chamomile ripens relaxation and reduces stress. Looking to improve immunity? This is a must.
Wellness Profile: Immunity, vital energy, blood circulation, heart health
Wellness Tea Box: Organic Tulsi Twist
With Tulsi Twist, we return to Ayurveda, the ancient Indian approach toward using exercise, diet, body work and botanicals to bring about wellness. The spine of this tea—tulsi (also known as “holy basil”)—gets widely used by Ayurvedic adherents to reduce inflammation, invigorate the mind and relieve fatigue—without resorting to a stimulant like caffeine. Tulsi, too, supports kidney and liver health.
This delicious organic blend also includes ginger root, lemon peel, strawberry leaf, marshmallow and lavender. The parade of botanicals deliver powerful health benefits—for example, energy from ginger, serenity from lavender and immune support from strawberry tea—that bolster bodies and minds, and can lead to longterm health consequences.
Wellness Profile: Anti-inflammatory, liver and kidney Health
Your wellness journey begins now! Get out there and exercise. Eat meals packed with real ingredients. Try practicing mindfulness every day. And begin exploring wellness teas!
