What Tea Is Good for Detox?
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It’s night five of the conference. You’ve made a lot of great connections, and you’ve learned a ton about your career.
You’ve also been out drinking with your newfound besties every single night. Until 1:30 AM.
Minimum.
So here you are, 6:43 AM again, staring down with bleary eyes at your mug in the hotel restaurant waiting for yet another hollandaise-slathered eggs Benedict with home fries. A few errant leaves swirl lazily at the bottom of the cup, and you dimly remember your grandmother whispering a secret in your ear when you were young.
“Tea leaves, dear. They can tell you the future.”
You gaze into the cup. There it is. A message. A vision from the universe.
You need to detox.
OMG You Need to Detox
When you’ve burned the candle at both ends and torched the candleholder and part of the table cloth, you don’t need a modern lifestyle solution. You need to take it all the way back with some ancient wisdom and get yourself realigned with the time-honored natural remedy: tea.
We can talk science all day—and we will—but the healing properties of tea have been experientially known for the last 4500 years, ever since Emperor Shennong was blessed by a few restorative leaves leisurely wafting through his window and into his drinking vessel.
Today, life is more stressful and chemically toxic than ever, but if you know what tea is good for detox, you can rinse away the poisons of the world and find that mellow balance you need to keep your spirit energized.
Tea for the Ill-erman: Demystifying Detox
Your friends are on their latest detox fad, but the truth? You’re a cynic. A non-believer. You read Scientific American and delight in the occasional grammar error (shh, but seriously tho!). But this whole “detox” stuff?
Jeez, just say you want to lose 7 lbs and cut out the gin, Keeley.
Look, we get it. No really, WE GET IT, but the fact of the matter is there’s a lot of science to back this up, and tea can be your number one ally in the fight. And the top causes of toxic build-up and chronic wear-down? You guessed it. Booze and stress.
Alcohol
Alcohol is one of the most toxic legally consumable substances on the planet, but darn it, it’s also delicious.
And when we say it’s horrible for you, we mean horrible. Truely. It’s awful. It depletes your liver enzymes, chips away at your sleep cycle, inflames your tissues, and demolishes your body’s ability to recover from stress and physical activity. It even dehydrates you. Don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your body hates that.
Oh, and those liver enzymes: they also break down common carcinogens like benzene that trickle into our water supply. Pity you don’t have any.
We told you. Alcohol is bad.
What Tea is Good for Detox: You need two things. Ginger and turmeric. Ginger contains gingerols and shogaols which reduce inflammation and help with that all-important liver cell regrowth. Turmeric gives you a dose of curcumin, which has well-documented, near miraculous anti-inflammatory properties that date back to the Vedas.
Talk to your doctor: they’ll tell you the same thing. Ginger and turmeric teas are medicine, and your exhausted physiology needs them to flush out the disaster you’ve inflicted on it to get back to optimal functioning. There’s a reason these things exist on our planet.
“Drink your tea, sweetie.”
Stress
When you’re stressed, your body douses your system with all kinds of fight-or-flight chemicals to keep you alive. You’ve heard the expression “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” That’s a bunch of nonsense. Most of what doesn’t kill you leaves you crippled but still alive, and that’s exactly the number your body’s throwing down on the craps table of your stressful life.
Cortisol stays in your system for hours after your brain floods you with it under stress, and it causes weight gain, depression, headaches, and high blood pressure. Adrenaline’s even better. It’s nearly chemically identical to amphetamines, and when it’s released it saturates your muscles and arteries to trigger anxiety, tachycardia, and hypertension.
Hey, fun fact: you know why Michelin-starred chefs prefer humanely raised animals? They’re not just nice people. You can taste stress hormones in the meat. That’s what you’re made of, too.
Stress also causes your body to dump sugar into your bloodstream, which results in a buildup of lactic acid, joint pain, bloating, and nausea. It’s the best.
So, yeah. Stress is really, really bad for you. The next time your kids are misbehaving, remind them they’re actually killing you.
What Tea is Good for Detox: Green tea. It’s the only thing that counteracts all the side effects of stress and works with your body to clear out those nasty stress toxins.
Green tea is full of antioxidants like epigallocatechin gallate, which eliminates oxidative stress induced by your body’s chemical deluge. It also stimulates your natural metabolic processes to help your liver and kidneys cleanse the hormones and sugars saturating your blood and tissues. Plus, that not-too-much hit of caffeine and L-theanine aminos assists in clearing the blood-brain barrier to cut the fuzz and get your balance and focus back.
“Make a wish. Let the leaves speak to you.”
Take Your Medicine with Leaves of Leisure
You can’t avoid stress, but if you know what tea is good for detox you can do something about it. Leaves of Leisure teas are all about calming your aura and helping your body relax, recover, and realign. Whether it’s a cup of ginger-turmeric Road Trip or a warm mug of Bath Time tangerine green tea, you’re going to melt that stress away and return to life cleansed and ready to go.