The Cold Nature of Green Tea

Here in Thailand they say that the reason durian and mangosteen produce fruit during the same season is that one is needed to balance the other.

What does that mean, one balancing the other? I asked this of my wife once while eating both after a meal, and was told that durian is very hot and mangosteen is cold, so they balance each other. I wasn't any closer to understanding this than I had been, as both had come out of our refrigerator and seemed cool enough to me.

What she had been talking about was the nature of the fruits. In Chinese medicine, all food stuffs and medicinal herbs have a temperature nature based on the effects that they produce in the body when consumed. These are broken down into cold, cool, neutral, warm, and hot natures, which correspond to the yin or yang energy of that plant. Yin is associated with a cold and sinking nature, soft, damp, internally manifesting and feminine. Yang is associated with a hot and rising nature, hard, dry, externally manifesting and masculine. Thus durian is dubbed the king of the fruits and mangosteen the queen.

This will seem really strange at first, but once you begin making connections between these concepts and your own experiences as well as scientific data, it will actually become a very simple and effective frame of reference for dietary management, almost intuitive.

What you want to achieve is a balance of these forces, neither an excess nor deficiency. We can illustrate this most effectively by looking first at symptoms caused by excess. An excess of heat might manifest itself with symptoms such as flushed face and rapid pulse(a small sample of symptoms for this illustration). One example of a hot food you are probably familiar is cayenne pepper (or any other chili pepper). What is the immediate aftermath of hasty ingestion of too much chili pepper? Flushed face and elevated heart rate. Some foods that classify as cooling are yogurt, mint, and cilantro. Now think about the pairing of raita with spicier Indian dishes and you will begin to get a sense of this balance in a very immediate and palpable context.

Tea is not exempt from this. Unscented green tea has a cooling nature. In moderation or when trying to dispel heat, this is no problem. But when consumed in great excess in an otherwise balanced system, it can create an over-cooling. Symptoms of excess cool(and if you ever have had a touch too much, some of this won't surprise you at all) can be things like excessive clear or whitish urination(when you seem to be evacuating more than you are taking in), painful gas, numbness or cold sensation in the extremities and even diarrhea.

In addition to that, it can be somewhat hard on otherwise compromised systems. I was reading through some message boards about green tea health benefits, when I came across a thread of people talking about their IBS and green tea's failure to help with it and even aggravation of it. They had read and heard that green tea was loaded down with healthy goodness, but no one had bothered to tell them that it's cold nature can be very harsh on the stomach and digestive system. In fact, I don't think very many people are bothering to tell anyone about this.

In the west, we are accustomed to drinking teas from India and Sri Lanka with milk/cream and sugar. The tea itself is usually cooked to the point of near burning and much of the caffeine and polyphenols are lost in the process, the milk helps coat the stomach, and the sugar by its sweetness possesses a warming nature. Prepared in that fashion it is safe enough to drink on an empty stomach and in great quantity, especially as the marked decrease in caffeine and polyphenols cuts back on the tea's inducing the production of gastric acid which is the primary cause of the discomfort in the first place(in western terminology), but green and white tea are totally different animals. The wisdom from the area where tea grew to maturation states that one should wait at least 30 minutes after eating before partaking of the tea, and to never drink whilst eating.

Another thing we usually foul up is the brewing of the tea. Green and white teas cannot be subjected to extremely hot water, nor should they be left to steep for more than a few seconds unless they have been tightly rolled, in which case a minute for the first brewing and a few seconds for each brewing after that should do fine.

One last note on the coldness of green tea; there are plenty of lightly oxidized oolongs, scented green teas, red teas, pu erhs, and even black teas that are a full of the disease fighting health promoting agents, great flavor, and mild stimulants you are looking for, but that do not have the cold nature of green and white teas. Why not step outside the box? As the saying goes, yi shi tong yuan - medicine and food are of the same source. So pay attention to what you eat (and drink!)!