~The Great Debate: Coffee or Tea, Tea or Coffee!~

Right to Food Zine: Spring issue!

Original article submission Dated for February 10th, 2023!

~The Great Debate!~

'Coffee or Tea, Tea or Coffee?'

One of our many centuries oldest, most loved debates, on which one is best? Tea was first recorded in history books harvested back in 2700 BCE, (but as we know life on earth has been around far longer than that, so likely these plants have a larger history then we can imagine, but for here and now I will use the information found in the books) so on that note coffee was discovered in the 10th century! Now add to that time, all the sugar and milk and cream that's been added to our cups for those of us who simply just can`t do black or straight, and constantly forget to look to honey for an alternative solution and what do we get? A lot of information we should have probably taken into a much stronger account of sooner, and adjusted in our coffee and tea drinking lifestyles!

Today we are seeing publications on How excessive sugar consumption can lead to impaired memory, linking it to an increased risk of dementia. This made me realize it was time to write something about it for everyone! We need to choose wisely what we eat and drink if we want to be strong and healthy and live longer and have much better lives! To start I would like to tell you all a little something good that few people probably know about how to drink your delicious hot beverage and enjoy it better and that is WHAT we drink our tea and coffee from, and how we make it and the water we use? I will use tea for this example!

If you use a styrofoam cup it reduces the flavor molecules, which ruins the tastiness of your tea.

Colors of the mug in which you drink from, Red vs White etc... Affects our brains reaction to what we are tasting and experiencing! Red mugs = us experiencing the taste of sweeter tea! (meaning it adds to the ripeness & sweetness) of it for us!

Many people have hard water from their taps and water system and even the kettles we use depending on the age and use and time water spends sitting in them before each deep cleaning treatment and … well this is a recipe for disaster. As it can and usually does cause a gooey little film to take over the top of your cups (once you've stopped stirring and let your hot drink sit and cool while you sip away slowly at it,) the result is a hard water effect! AND ICK none of us can enjoy drinking what's in our cups when we are looking down at that! So it is recommended that if one can FILTER their water FIRST before boiling, this will help to eliminate such a result; so that we can go right on enjoying our cup many minutes after we've poured and stirred it!

Steep Time: Herein lies our problem…

Who in the world dying to take that first sip of their delicious hot drink actually wants to wait the appropriate time before drinking their cup of heaven? Well whether you choose to listen to my advice or not at least I`ve done the honors of respecting the tea itself for the time it needs by telling all of you, and then you do you and see which kind of cup you end up with? :-)

The perfect steep time for a wonderful black tea is actually about 4 to 5 minutes! If you are not drinking a caffeine tea then you can steep your bag for about 2 to 3 minutes to get it`s full effect! And in both cases if you wait you are promised to get a fuller, stronger flavor tea from each bag used!

(well at least we know now where the use and trend of using 2 tea bags at once stems from! I mean who really wants to have to reheat their tea in the microwave again just to save on tea bag use and full flavor effect?) So take your pick, you decide?

As for me I will confess that I personally am a 2 bag tea drinker indeed, I like my full flavor and best benefits right away, when it's one of those days, or me coming down from one of those days, the last thing I want to do is sit there and wait; I personally don't want to have a 5 minute conversation with my cup of tea, when I'm really needing that first sip and then those few glorious gulps after identifying that it is now safe to drink larger amounts without burning my tongue off!

But that's just me!

On the other hand I do have a wonderful friend I love dearly who is completely the opposite of me. She will use the same tea bag, and just keep it in her cup and keep adding hot water and thinks it still tastes just as good as it did when it was brand new 2 to 3 cups of tea later! So her example really does teach us that with a little more patients we can get a bit more bang for our buck! So the question now that is left to be asked is which kind of tea drinker are you? 🙂

In short if you are not brewing or steeping your tea properly then you are not getting all the nutrients and benefits of what comes with drinking your tea! (Meaning that drinking tea may not be so much less complicated and easier to make and drink then coffee as we may have all thought it was)? So to end my recent journey in exploring the answers to tea and how to enjoy it to its fullest, I will tell you that the best temperature for the tea to be boiled and steeped at is 175-180 degrees… anything ABOVE 200 degrees fahrenheit can actually DESTROY the beneficial nutrients of tea! Not so easy compared to coffee now is it? 🙂

O.K. switching now it`s Coffee`s turn…

I will start with the obvious of course: that if we misuse our coffee, it will become our enemy number 1 of quality sleep and a few other things!

You see our circadian rhythm functions off of a regular 24 hour pattern. Cortisol (the stress hormone) helps you get up and stay awake for the day, while Melatonin (the sleep hormone) eases you into sleep and keeps you sleeping throughout the night! So 4 cups of coffee a day should be ones UPPER LIMIT because our daily maximum amount of caffeine from coffee should be no more than 400 mgs!

However that being said, we are essentially safer to leave it at 3 cups because of our other daily intake of things; we really should save about 100mgs for those other caffeine & sugar products like Pop and foods we eat that we don't usually plan on having! Ya know that irresistible can of Pepsi that comes with the sale of the cheesedog (with the works) you ordered on a whim from a hotdog vendor during your lunch break, (instead of eating the lunch you made) or the chocolate you found on sale at a store you dropped in to for a few items on your way home for the day?

Caffeine works by blocking adenosine, to help keep us from getting sleepy, then the adenosine build up once caffeine wears off will make you sleepy, causing those oh so famous Caffeine crashes that many of us know too well! You see coffee has 2 to 3 times MORE caffeine in it than tea does, so if we don't learn how to use it and when, then we are likely going to continue to face the repercussions and complications that come with drinking coffee wrong!

The best time of day to begin drinking coffee for you coffee lovers out there is NOT FIRST THING IN THE MORNING, right when you wake up! I mean come on confess how many people love their coffee so much that they actually have their coffee makers set to the time of when their first morning alarm goes off, so that coffee is ready to pour by the time you get down to the kitchen for that first cup of the day?

Well, this is actually the right time to use decaf coffee first if we really, really, must have that first early morning coffee of the day to get us going, as I`m certain so many of you do! :-) But the reality is back to our 24 hour hormone release pattern you need to WAIT for about 1-2 hours after waking up (which of course means many of you will already be at work by then and I know that`s a very big difference from that first cup in the morning at home alone still in your pj's with messy hair wonderful experience) but if we ingest that big gulp of caffeine anytime before that you`re actually being counter-productive to the purpose and need of the Cortisol in your body taking its full affect! And THIS my friends answers the mystery to why so many people suffer from those caffeine crashes, right in the middle of our morning or day at work, and find ourselves wanting to lay our heads down on our desk in front of us for just a few minutes! SIGH!

This now leads us to what the best ways of drinking and using both (coffee and tea) are? The answer I`m afraid is not something new, just something many of us don't like the thought of much less the taste, but the best way to benefit fully from both coffee and tea is to of course drink both of them BLACK! The bonus here for black coffee and tea drinkers is that it won't affect those of you who do enjoy intermittent fasting in the morning`s, it will actually help curb your hunger and aid in weight loss!

Closing arguments: Sensitive or not to Caffeine whether for coffee or tea what is the solution?

On the flip side of this whole thing there are of course those of you who are sensitive to caffeine, and that's where what time you start drinking coffee & tea and what time you end drinking caffeine will vary a bit between coffee and tea drinkers! But I will just give a general frame safe for everyone to follow for the sake of time and space in this article!

However for those of you who simply cannot tolerate coffee or the affects of the caffeine from it and are straight up loyal tea drinkers, (congratulations, pat yourself on the back, because these rules on how to balance your life with both simply will not apply the same) and you only need to concentrate on your one and only tea drinking love and the amount of trips you are willing to make to the bathroom throughout the day for the sake of your guilty pleasure and habit and how much of it you want to drink in a day? 🙂 But the hours recommended here and how you start and end your day are pretty much measurably the same!

1. Try waiting until around 9 am before having your first cup of strong caffeine drinking products to begin your day!

2. One`s last cup of coffee should be around no later than 4 pm. (for those sensitive ones you know yourself best, so you decide what time you need to quit coffee in order to be able to relax and still get to sleep at night, maybe a few of you need to stop at 1 or 2 pm?) But generally we are all pretty safe in having no problems in relaxing and coming down for the day and being able to fall asleep and get a good night's rest if we stop our coffee caffeine intake by the time noted here! 🙂

3. Stay active, keep fit, get fresh air, go for nice walks, or keep a modest workout at the gym type of routine and you should be good to go!

The answer in the end about the Great Debate of both and which one to drink? Well, quite simply it is the obvious one; since the recorded use of both back in the 2nd & 10th centuries … we should actually be drinking the RIGHT AMOUNT OF BOTH! In doing this we will be able to get all the right benefits they have to help in our well-being and maximize all of our health needs! The recommended amount of tea one should be drinking is about 3 cups a day if you are just drinking tea, whether it has caffeine in it or not! So if you take into account your coffee drinking for the day and your caffeine intake with food and drinks, you can measure what TYPE of TEA you need and at what time you need it.

This all comes down to re-training our brains to learn how to re-think and practice our use and thoughts of both in order to truly get this whole tea and coffee war in our lives to finally be over and balance right!!

Now my research shows that black tea has about 50 mgs of caffeine in it at full steep, and green tea has about 25 mgs of it at full steep, so if we started our mornings off with a black tea instead of coffee (which a 6 ounce cup has between 75 mg to 100 mgs of caffeine in it) we would avoid those midday caffeine crashes altogether, and have an overall better day, remain alert, feel rested and able to concentrate on our tasks and get our work done for that day and still have a nice calming soothing way to start off our mornings` while at home in our PJ's, before work!

And if we drink our green tea or calming and medicinal herbal teas in the evening after 4 pm, when we have stopped drinking coffee for the day, We will be helping our digestive system during meal times, with less indigestion and complications with heartburn, digestion and so on! Leading to a smoother and much more relaxing evening ahead! Yes it may mean a few more trips to the bathroom over all for the day, but I promise you your guts will love you, because things in the bathroom will work better then they ever have before!

And as for our memory improvement skills as we live and age in life, it will probably be near the end of the day just before bedtime or when you are in bed itself that you are feeling the full beneficial effects of your new tea drinking habits, when you now find yourself remembering more things throughout your days as you look back over them and think through all that you did and notice that you are not forgetting stuff like you used to when you were just drinking coffee!

So whether you are a student in school always doing homework and cramming for tests (while juggling a job) or well into your workforce years, you will see an improved work performance and overall better lifestyle change. Now young or old, how can any of us go wrong with that?

As for those select lucky few who can drink coffee or tea any time of the day and night and not have any problems with your washroom trips, activities, energy or daily functions right up until you go to bed and snuggle in under the blankets and still fall fast asleep for the night; If only there was a way you could give all the rest of us some of your magical body chemical chemistry, so that everyone could have it made like that? :-)

Thank-You for reading and coming along with me on my tea and coffee journey, Enjoy the rest of your new 2023 (P0st-Pandemic) year ahead!

Sincerely, the writer! :-)

The end!

Written by,

Jennifer Cooley!

[email protected] & https://www.rtfzine.org/

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