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Transcript

Kevin: (0:03 - 0:14) Hey, Michelle, how are you doing?

Michelle: I'm great!

Kevin: Awesome. Amazing. Amazing. Well, welcome back. This is part two of our Health Benefits of Tea episode.

Michelle: (0:15 - 0:15) 2 B.

Kevin: (0:16 - 0:32) 2 B. Yes. Yes. I think we've already established that. This is 2 B. I'm sorry. I've already forgotten that from the last cliffhanger. So, in the last episode, you covered off the cognitive and, oh, gosh, what do we cover?

Michelle: (0:33 - 0:49) Oh, we did cognitive function, cognitive decline kind of together. And I'm going to now, I'm going to reference the same symposium presentations from 2022 focusing on immune function, cardiovascular benefits, and tea and cancer.

Kevin: (0:50 - 0:50) Okay.

Michelle: (0:50 - 0:53) And the dietary guidelines for tea.

Kevin: (0:54 - 0:58) Excellent. Well, there's basically my entire intro. That's amazing. Thank you for doing all my work.

Michelle: (0:58 - 1:00) Well, there you go. No problem. I'm here for you.

Kevin: (1:00 - 1:05) I love it. Got your back. Excellent. So let's get into it.

Michelle: (1:05 - 2:08) Sounds good. All right, let's dive in. We'll do immune function next. So they say that tea should be a component of healthful food patterns as it may help to boost immune system and increase your body's resistance to illnesses among other health benefits. Tea helps your body ward off infection and end the resistance to illness among several other health benefits. Tea helps your body ward off infection in the event that you do become sick. And it will help your body respond to illness in a much more efficient way by ridding itself of the infection. Regular consumption of tea may help prevent certain diseases and it may also alleviate its severity when it does happen. So again, grandma was right. You're not feeling well, have a cup of tea. If you want to prevent illness, chances are having a cup of tea is going to help your immune system ward that off so you don't get sick in the first place. But if you do end up getting sick, it's going to help you get better faster.

Kevin: (2:09 - 2:12) Because British grannies never get sick. They wouldn't dare.

Michelle: (2:13 - 2:14) Excuse me while I sip my tea.

Kevin: (2:15 - 2:19) Yeah, exactly. I've already finished my tea and I don't have a pot in here.

Michelle: (2:20 - 2:22) What's in your cup today? What's in your cup?

Kevin: (2:23 - 2:30) So it was Himalayan black that I got from you that I fell in love with.

Michelle: (2:30 - 2:31) Nice choice.

Kevin: (2:31 - 2:34) Now I'm just drinking water from my water bottle. It's not as interesting.

Michelle: (2:34 - 4:14) I'm sipping a beautiful dark tea, a class called Pour from Yunnan, China. Yeah. And so I'm very much loving that. All right. So back to green tea and immune function. And this study does focus primarily on green tea. And it's those green tea catechins. So catechins are a polyphenolic compound or the antioxidant compound that is most prevalent in green tea and white tea because it's most prevalent in the lesser oxidized teas. So teas that haven't turned brown or black. It doesn't mean that the other teas don't have any. They just have less of them. You don't lose them. They just turn into a different type of polyphenol. So a different type of antioxidant. Catechins in particular have been shown to help a host fight against a variety of pathogens. So decreasing the pathogen's ability to infect the host and also helping the host's immune system spring into action. Green tea catechins have been shown to improve autoimmune disorders by promoting more self-tolerance and suppressing autoantigen-induced inflammatory attack because that's what an autoimmune disease is and an autoimmune disease is the body attacking itself, falsely recognizing something as being foreign and thinking it needs to attack it. So they've shown that green tea catechins can help promote self-tolerance. So help it suppress that autoimmune action.

Kevin: (4:15 - 4:18) So green tea helps you accept yourself. That's amazing.

Michelle: (4:19 - 4:42) Loving yourself from the inside out. And helps to enhance tissue repair. That's exciting to me. Because a lot of people understand they have an autoimmune condition and they know that they have to be very careful and take steps to prevent those autoimmune triggers, but they don't really know how to fix it. You know what I mean?

Kevin: (4:42 - 4:43) Right.

Michelle: (4:43 - 6:10) Right. So that's pretty exciting. And then they say anti-infection effect of green tea catechins may be achieved through several mechanisms. So it can have a direct antiviral effect by actually inhibiting viral absorption, meaning stopping the virus from affecting you, stopping virus penetration, stopping membrane fusion, and replication in the upper respiratory tract. So really, really preventative. And then number two, immune-enhancing effect on helping to clear the virus, meaning after you did get infected, helping to get rid of it faster. And then number three, anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidative effects to help reduce tissue damage. So helping to prevent damage. Another application of green tea catechins, and so they call them GTCs. That's an actual scientific term. That's why we're, even though we know there's a lot of this in white tea as well, they're sort of termed green tea catechins is what they call them, GTCs. Another application of green tea catechins is for preventing and migrating T-cell-mediated autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, and Sjogren's syndrome. So that's like, what?

Kevin: (6:11 - 6:12) Wow. Yeah.

Michelle: (6:12 - 6:26) MS, RA, inflammatory bowel disease, and Sjogren's. So that's pretty darn exciting if it helps to mitigate what causes that autoimmune disease to develop.

Kevin: (6:26 - 6:27) Right?

Michelle: (6:27 - 6:44) Absolutely. So there's a whole lot there about immune function that should make us very excited. It's not just about virus. It's also about slowing or helping to prevent autoimmune disease susceptibility. So love that.

Kevin: (6:44 - 6:44) Yeah.

Michelle: (6:44 - 6:48) Okay. So then, cardiovascular disease. You excited?

Kevin: (6:48 - 6:49) Yes.

Michelle: (6:49 - 8:02) So number one global killer in the world, cardiovascular disease. So the symposium summary says, from all of the research presented in this area, cardiometabolic diseases like diabetes and heart disease are the number one cause of death worldwide. And the results from population studies suggest that tea consumption is inversely associated with adverse cardiometabolic outcomes. Tea is a major source of flavonoids in the diet. American tea drinkers have been shown to have 20 times higher flavonoid intakes compared to those who do not consume tea. And second to water, tea is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. And based on an extensive and variety of scientific research designs, two cups of unsweetened tea per day has the potential to mitigate cardiometabolic disease risk and progression in adults. A genetically predicted extra daily cup of tea consumption was associated with a 21% reduced risk of small vessel stroke.

Kevin: (8:03 - 8:03) Wow.

Michelle: (8:04 - 8:04) What?

Kevin: (8:05 - 8:06) That's huge.

Michelle: (8:06 - 8:31) So think about it. So stroke not only could potentially kill you, but it could definitely alter you permanently. You could end up with some paralysis, cognitive decline, or other things. So each cup of daily consumption was associated with an average of 1.5% lower risk of all-cause mortality, which means death by any cause.

Kevin: (8:31 - 8:32) Right.

Michelle: (8:32 - 8:42) So it could just simply one more cup of tea per day can reduce your risk of dying from anything by 1.5%. I like those odds.

Kevin: (8:42 - 8:44) Right? I'll bet on those odds.

Michelle: (8:44 - 9:13) And then 4% risk of cardiovascular disease mortality specifically. And a 2% lower risk of any cardiovascular disease event that didn't result in death. And a 4% lower risk of stroke. So those are... Kevin, okay, let me put this in perspective. If there was a drug trial that showed that, it would be a household name, that drug.

Kevin: (9:13 - 9:14) Right, right.

Michelle: (9:15 - 9:15) Right?

Kevin: (9:16 - 9:18) Well, I will argue the tea's a bit of a household name, but anyway.

Michelle: (9:18 - 10:49) But when you go to your doctor for some sort of vascular disease or cardiovascular concern, the first thing they recommend, or maybe it's not part of the conversation, have you thought about drinking an extra cup of tea per day? No, they'll put you on medication. And I'm not saying that that isn't the right thing for them to do. I'm just saying that if it was a drug that proved that, everybody would be talking about it. But very few people know that tea has this incredible potential to provide these protective benefits. So they summarize this sort of area of cardiovascular benefits of tea. And they did study, by the way, I want to acknowledge both black and green tea in the cardiovascular. Because black teas, remember how I mentioned that the catechins or the green tea catechins, more of them convert to a different type of antioxidant in the darker teas, darker oolongs and black teas and poor teas. Those black tea antioxidants are shown to confer very high cardiovascular benefits. But the green tea catechins do as well. So when you look at all of the different biomarkers and mechanisms that tea is affecting, they summarize that this bountiful beverage is one which consumers can very easily add to their diet and create a healthier and longer life for themselves.

Kevin: (10:50 - 10:50) Yeah.

Michelle: (10:50 - 11:00) The quote by one of the key researchers of these studies was that tea is a very powerful and practical tool for improving overall health.

Kevin: (11:01 - 11:15) Well, yeah. If it's got all this cardiovascular and immune and cognitive dementia related benefits, like it's, you got the slam dunk there. It's hitting everything.

Michelle: (11:16 - 12:52) Even before I was exposed to this research for these symposiums, just from the cursory reading that I started to do, because remember I was doing nutrition school and tea Somali training at the same time, I was already forming the opinion and telling people that this is, this beverage, if it's good quality and with good quality water, is maybe the largest source of dietary flavonoids that we can get easily get into our diet. Because it's easy, it's easier to drink a whole bunch of something than it is to eat a whole bunch of something. And the science is proving that out. They showed in this symposium that brewed tea is the primary source of dietary flavonoids and particularly the category called flavon-3-ols in diet. And it is basically, they've just affirmed what I already knew or already suspected. Okay, so that was cardiovascular. Now we're going to go to cancer, the one that we started out, you know, being very, very concerning and having doubled in my lifetime and something that's going to afflict one quarter of Canadians in their lifetime, according to the best available research. Second leading cause of mortality worldwide, or as I said in Canada, number one. The data also shows that at least 30 to 40% of cancers could be prevented by several modifiable risk factors, such as avoiding tobacco, increasing physical activity and adherence to healthy diets. So they're looking at the same research that WHO is quoting, right?

Kevin: (12:52 - 12:53) Of course, of course.

Michelle: (12:53 - 14:40) And they summarized by saying, higher intakes of key consumption may reduce risk of certain cancers. Specifically, there is evidence that some polyphenols have cancer-preventing properties, as well as other properties that are beneficial against cancer, such as antioxidants and anti-inflammatory. Tea, they say, is a beverage rich in flavonoids, which are bioactive compounds with several anti-carcinogenic properties in experimental studies. So what they're saying there, bioactive means that they've proven that it doesn't just contain these healthy compounds that could benefit us, but they've proven that it's bioactive, meaning that it actually is put to use in the body. They can find it actually doing something, so something that you could consume that might be high in an elemental beneficial property, but it's not bioactive, meaning that you swallow it and you poop it out, or you swallow it and you pee it out, and you don't get any benefit from it. Because that's a concern, right? So the fact that they can prove that it's bioactive, bioavailability is the key. So we know that it becomes immediately bioactive, and that it has several anti-carcinogenic properties. So carcinogenic are things that are cancer-causing, and anti-carcinogenic means that it stops things from being cancer-causing. So they summarize by saying, suggestive evidence indicates that tea consumption may reduce risk of biliary tract, breast, endometrial, liver, and oral cancers.

Kevin: (14:40 - 14:40) Oh, wow.

Michelle: (14:40 - 14:41) That's a lot.

Kevin: (14:41 - 14:42) Yeah, that's huge.

Michelle: (14:42 - 14:46) And that's just what they can prove so far.

Kevin: (14:46 - 14:47) Right, right.

Michelle: (14:48 - 15:28) It's a good start. Yeah, and they exercise prudent caution in stating that in any piece of literature that gets published in a journal by saying may reduce, like they can't guarantee it. So I would never, I tell this to my customers, I would never suggest that you're going to start drinking tea and all is going to be well. But if you're looking to arm yourself with the things that can have an actual measurable effect on your outcomes, adding tea to your consumption regimen is likely to really benefit you if it was good quality.

Kevin: (15:28 - 15:29) It's certainly not going to hurt.

Michelle: (15:30 - 17:01) Right? But usually if somebody chooses to pick up a cup of tea and they didn't before, they're also going to not pick up something else that might have been a detractor of health. Yep, makes sense. So there's also the aspect of what you're removing. It's a very simple substitute, which is why my motto has always been that tea can be a doorway to a healthier diet and lifestyle and a comfortable place to start. So just to summarize all of that, I want to just present some of the takeaways that they presented about what's missing in dietary guidelines for tea. And this is kind of where they're going with this. They summarize by saying that tea consumption has the potential to modify several chronic disease and degenerative diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and neurogenerative process. And what they're hoping for in this process of contributing to the body of evidence is clearer recommendations in the current dietary guidance to support this growing evidence that tea is a health-promoting beverage. So they're looking to actually make it so that they're allowed to make these health claims. Right, right. And food and beverage-based guidance needs to include broader recognition of the relationship between products that are rich in non-nutritive bioactive compounds, such as tea flavonoids, and long-term health outcomes. So more than just vitamins and minerals, right?

Kevin: (17:01 - 17:01) Yes, yes.

Michelle: (17:02 - 17:45) And they acknowledge that there are benefits to establishing dietary reference intakes for these bioactive flavonoids as a path to complement food-based guidance, right? Because let me tell you why that's important. Because I'm willing to bet that if you walked into your doctor's office today and you told them that you drank five to 10 cups of tea per day, their inclination might be, ooh, you probably shouldn't drink that much. That's probably too much caffeine, right? Because they only know to address the caffeine concern. They don't know how to acknowledge. They're maybe not even aware of this.

Kevin: (17:45 - 17:49) Of all the background research that you've been talking about, yeah.

Michelle: (17:49 - 19:22) Of this flavonoid component, right? And the fact that the caffeine and the theanine and the caffeine and then the flavonoids work together in the bloodstream, right? So this is what I mentioned is the problem with lumping tea in with coffee. We don't metabolize it the same way. We don't utilize those compounds the same way. It's not fair to paint tea and coffee with the same brush. They believe that dietary guidance will provide more accurate and relevant direction for consumers in the context of the diversity of tea. So all of the different tea options that are available to them, as well as other, there's other foods containing these flavonoid compounds. And we largely only talk about micronutrients and macronutrients. We don't talk about the other flavonoids. So there's a lot of encouragement here. There's a lot of hope here. There's a lot of empowerment there. And the most important thing would be making sure there's quality in your cup. If there's quality in your cup, then you're going to get these benefits. If you bought the cheapest one on the shelf, I mean, it's probably better than nothing. But what if it was also high in pesticide, laden with pesticide and other things, or maybe detractors, or if you're not paying attention to your water, which is why I have this very holistic approach to cautioning on adding that tea consumption. If you're going to do it, do it with quality. Treat your body as it deserves to be treated.

Kevin: (19:22 - 19:48) But it sounds like just for, to play devil's advocate for a second and to be realistic for a second, for people who can't afford the quality, it still sounds like it's better to drink that store, that grocery store quality bag tea, because as you said earlier, it will stop you potentially from drinking something that's even worse than that.

Michelle: (19:49 - 20:16) Sure. But I would argue, Kevin, though, that even the very best quality loose leaf tea, if you take advantage of the re-steepability, is going to be less than 50 cents a cup. If it was the best quality, and if it was, like I'm talking rare, if it was excellent tea, but it wasn't one of the more bougie ones, it's still going to be less than 25 cents a cup.

Kevin: (20:16 - 20:21) Because we don't want bougie tea. I don't drink bougie tea.

Michelle: (20:21 - 20:35) You're drinking a bougie tea right now. I love me a good bougie tea. This is the most affordable health modification that you can make, even if it was the really, really good stuff.

Kevin: (20:36 - 20:36) Right.

Michelle: (20:37 - 20:55) Do you know what I mean? It's not very expensive at all. You store it properly, it's safe for two years, stored in an airtight, opaque container in a cool, dark place. You don't need to worry about it breaking the bank.

Kevin: (20:56 - 21:44) Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay. Well, this has been fascinating. This is really, I knew, you know, from our previous conversations, I knew tea was good for you, but it's interesting to break down how many different ways it's good for you, like through the mental and the cardiovascular and the cancer and the immune system. But then it's also interesting to see all of the science behind this. And it's not just word of mouth, and it's not just those British grannies saying it's good for you, but it's actual, you know, hard science that's agreeing that, yeah, this is a good thing. And it's something that is very easy to change and easy to add into your daily routine. I love it.

Michelle: (21:45 - 22:00) And I just want to add, Kevin, like in prior symposiums, like there were far more areas than just the ones that I mentioned. But those are the most recent sort of significant areas that they presented in 2022. So there's an awful lot in there for people to love.

Kevin: (22:00 - 22:02) Right, right. Wow. That's amazing.

Michelle: (22:03 - 22:06) Yeah. Thanks for letting me nerd out on that.

Kevin: (22:06 - 22:32) You definitely nerded out. And it was great. It's always fun to see you nerd out. But we also, I hope, kept it reasonably simple because I understood almost everything that came out of your mouth, just about. So, you know, I take that as a good sign. Thank you. You didn't get too, too, too, too deep into that. You stuck to the summary of the findings, which is good. You didn't go into page like 37 of the findings.

Michelle: (22:32 - 22:34) I'm learning. I'm learning.

Kevin: (22:35 - 22:55) I keep you honest. Okay. So that's amazing. It's time, as usual, for my ending dad joke. Yay! Are you ready for this? Okay. Unfortunately, it's not tea based because I used all my tea jokes for the last episode. So, you know, work with me here.

Michelle: (22:56 - 22:56) Boo!

Kevin: (22:57 - 23:17) It's beverage based. So a guy walks into a bar and there's a horse serving drinks. The horse asks, what are you staring at? Haven't you ever seen a horse tending bar before? The guy says, it's not that. I just never thought the parrot would sell the place. I need to get some good sound effects.

Michelle: (23:17 - 23:22) I love that kind of walks into a bar joke where it's absolutely ridiculous.

Kevin: (23:22 - 23:24) It is. It is. Absolutely.

Michelle: (23:26 - 23:27) That's awesome. I love that.

Kevin: (23:28 - 23:31) Okay. Well, thank you as always, Michelle. It's been a pleasure.

Michelle: (23:31 - 23:33) It's my pleasure. The pleasure's all mine.

Kevin: (23:33 - 23:35) No, no, no. The pleasure's all mine.

Michelle: (23:35 - 23:36) No, I insist.

Kevin: (23:36 - 23:43) No, no, no, no. Really. It's all my pleasure. And we will catch you next time. And don't forget, eat your greens.

Michelle: (23:44 - 23:45) Be real, everyone.

Kevin: (23:46 - 24:47) This has been Nutrition for Noobs. We hope you're a bit more enlightened about how your fantastic and complicated body works with the food you put into it. If you have a question or a topic you'd like Michelle to discuss, drop us a line at n4noobs@gmail.com. That's the letter N, the number 4. N-O-O-B-S at gmail.com. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favorite platform might be. Also, please consider leaving a review or telling your friends. That's the best way to spread the word. We'll see you next time with another interesting topic. The views and opinions expressed on Nutrition for Noobs are those of the hosts. It is not intended to be a substitute for medical, nutritional, or health advice. Listeners should seek a personal consultation with a qualified practitioner if they have any concerns, or before commencing any actions mentioned in the podcast.