Hi! I’m Dr. Weil. Here’s some valuable
health information from my friend, former student, and colleague, Dr. Jim Nicolai. Hi, I’m Dr. Jim Nicolai. I’m the medical director for the Dr. Weil
integrative wellness program at Miraval Resort and spa, And I’m gonna talk to you about developing a taste for tea. This doesn't mean that you don't
necessarily have to drink other caffeinated beverages but if you can begin to start leaning more
towards using good quality tea as an alternative to say coffee or soda or other forms of caffeine, this can be a wonderful way for you to
have less caffeine and get the benefits of tea that you might not get when you're
drinking other beverages. One of the main benefits of tea right off
the bat is, is it has probably a third to maybe even a half less caffeine than
other drinks, but the magical qualities of tea is it
has an amino acid called L-Theanine. and L-Theanine is calmative, it creates a mental state
of alert calm, which is not something found in
any other caffeinated beverage. I often liken this to take a look at cultures around the world that use
caffeinated beverages most of the time We drink coffee to get wired and if you ever look at tea time, tea
time is based on stepping back slowing down calming down. You get the benefits of
that through what's been the beverage and so
that's the magic of what tea can give you. So, in developing a taste for tea, my
favorite drink is green tea and my favorite green tea is matcha. Matcha has a great story for me, it was one of the things that Dr. Weil turned me onto when i was first training with him and i remember my first cup of matcha tea was like drinking essence of summertime. Green, defined. and so what I’d love to do is demonstrate
how to make matcha tea and the practice that's involved in it
'cause it's not just getting a cup of tea and letting it steep. There's a meditation involved that's a wonderful practice to learn how
to do. you have to understand that tea, or green
tea is from one plant, the camilla cementus plant and what matcha is, is it's the tea leaves ground into a fine powder and so what happens is, what you're
drinking it's not necessarily what we would call a suspension. It's, it's a solution, meaning taking the hot water and letting the
components of the tea come into the water. Your actually
drinking leaves suspended in the water and so you’re really drinking a green
drink, your drinking a plant that's into a solution. uh... one of the things about matcha is, is that this green tea powder is concentrated and it has all the
healthy benefits of green tea things, like the antioxidants that we call
polyphenols that help with preventing heart disease, lowering cholesterol. Matcha has
concentrated anti-oxidants, one of which is called ECGC. The big doctor term for this is Epigallocatechin gallete. ECGC is better to know and ECGC kills cancer cells and
protects them or causes them to not grow as fast. So this is an anti cancer benefit that
you're getting with matcha that’s much more concentrated than any other form of
tea or green tea that you might be drinking. So the first thing that we do when we're preparing matcha... is you have to know your instruments, and the first instrument that you get to know is what we call the matcha bowl, or the Chanoyu. the Chanoyu is something that most people don't drink tea out of. This is an ornate clay bowl that's made in an artisanal kind of way and it's made
in some fashions to be extremely ornate. It can be just a
regular bowl that you drink out of, but the first thing that you do is you warm the
bowl, and what you do is, you boil water and you pour it into the bowl. Notice the steam coming out of it. You want to get the water to boiling and
then turn it off because what you want to do is ultimately drink the tea right around a hundred and eighty
degrees. So you wanna let the water cool down
just a bit so that you're getting it at that
temperature and then what you do is you allow the bowl to warm up for probably about thirty to
sixty seconds and the warm water will cause the bowl to heat up a little bit. Then, once the water is warm enough you wanna discard it and then just dry it out. And you can use a paper towel or a napkin or anything that just causes
it to be dry. From there, you then just use your matcha and there's
a couple of ways to do this. The first thing about matcha is, is that because
it's a powder it can tend to get clumpy. So one of the things that you can do is
you can use a filter to cause the clumpiness to get into a
fine powder. This is already been pre filtered and it's
in the uh... a nice ornate bowl that allows the, the powder to stay pretty fine, and what you want to do is you want to
use this spoon, which is also called a chashuku and put somewhere between one to two clumps of tea in so that this is about how much tea
that you have and then you pour water in and the trick with matcha is that matcha is not necessarily something that you drink as a beverage where you pour the water
all the way full. What the goal for matcha is, is to drink this, this tea
beverage in somewhere between three or four large
drinks or large slurpy drinks. You use the whisk, which is made
out of bamboo, Leave it to the Japanese to make something so beautiful, right? and what you're doing is your
stirring this power into fine frothy liquid so that ultimately it has a froth to it. And if you smell it, it really has a smell of of grass or spinachy, plants based,
vegetal aromas uh... and one of the ways that you
drink it is with a very, very large slurp. Essence of green... and so what I will do is I’ll drink this
often times with my breakfast as a quick way to get a caffeinated beverage into my body that's energizing, filled with anti-oxidants, green, along with all the other colors that i
use and it's a it's a wonderful way to start
the day.
