This morning I went to my local Mega-Mart looking for some fish oil supplements. On the same shelf, I noticed that I could buy a giant bottle for $10 or a tiny bottle for $30. Common sense told me that the giant bottle for $10 was a no brainer, but then I started to actually research it. It ends up that the expensive fish oil contains more than 10x the nutrients as the cheap one. To get my recommended dose of the cheap stuff I would need to take 10 pills, when I could just take 1 pill (of the same size) for the expensive one. This made my decision easy, I bought the tiny bottle.
This same concept applies to Green Tea. Some teas have a lot of the healthy compound EGCG, some do not. A new study by consumerlabs.com puts real numbers behind this and I think the results will surprise you.
A quick reminder on EGCG
EGCG is a compound unique to tea (and some wild mushrooms) that has shown to be one of the healthiest things you can consume. It lowers your risk of heart disease, reduces cholesterol, reduces your risk of a stroke, reduces your risk of cancer, helps you lose weight and helps prevent diabetes. This compound is the reason why everyone (rightfully so) thinks that Green Tea is so healthy for you.
Four ways you can drink Green Tea
There are four main ways that you can drink Green Tea: pre-bottled beverages (like Snapple), teabags, K-Cups and loose tea. Consumerlab.com studied all four of these and came up with the following averages:
- Bottled Green Tea - 20.72 mg EGCG per 8 oz.
- Teabags of Green Tea - 19.42 mg EGCG per 8 oz.
- K-Cups - 39.2 mg EGCG per 8 oz.
- Loose Tea - 85.8 mg EGCG per 8 oz.
What this means
There is a pretty big difference in the EGCG levels of the Green Tea varieties listed above. Both bottled and bagged are similar with roughly 20mg per 8oz serving. Surprisingly, K-Cups have a decent amount with about 40mg per 8oz, which is surprising because I find the taste pretty, um… bad. Loose tea came in at a whopping 85 mg per 8oz, which just reinforces my belief that loose teas are better in every way.
Conclusion
Just like fish oil, there is a huge difference in how healthy some forms of Green Tea are compared to others. Sure, you could drink 5 teabags of bagged Green Tea to get the same health benefits as 1 cup of loose tea, but the point is that the quality of the loose tea is higher. In addition, if you used teabags you would miss out on the wonderful aroma, flavor and experience loose tea provides and who wants to do that?
This is precisely what we had in mind when we designed our Tea Infusers and Pyramid sachets. Both contain premium loose leaf teas with much much higher EGCG levels than the average national brand tea bags at your local grocery store. To take this experience even further we launched our premium lose leaf teas last week.
Here is the link to our world class loose leaf teas in tins:
https://www.petittea.com/collections/leaf-tea-in-tins
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!
Leave a comment