Living Maxwell

Archive

Sei Mee Tea Edible Green – This is No Ordinary Organic Green Tea

At my two local organic markets here in NYC, Integral Yoga Natural Foods and Lifethyme Market, in-store demos take place at least a few times per week.

Naturally curious and wanting to learn about new organic products, I always stop by to see what they are selling.

Yet, never have I left the demo tables overly impressed. That is, until the other day.

It only took a few minutes for me to understand why Sei Mee Tea Edible Green is so interesting and so different than the other organic green tea products I have been drinking.

BACKGROUND ON TEA

With almost all the tea that we drink, we steep a tea bag or loose tea in water for a few minutes. Then, we take it out of the water and throw it away.

However, according to Sei Mee Tea, many of the important health properties in the tea are not water soluble and are therefore not extracted in the brewing process

So, this means that we are actually not receiving many of the health benefits from tea.

In order to prevent this from happening, we need to consume the entire leaf.

But how do we do this without eating that actual leaf itself?

We do it by drinking ground tea. And this is exactly what Sei Mee Tea Edible Green is – ground organic green tea.

All we do is add the ground tea to water, stir, and drink.

Furthermore, since we don’t have to worry about extracting the tea compounds from the leaves, we don’t need to use hot water. Either hot or cold water can be used.

This is particularly relevant to me because I use tea in my smoothies.

Normally, I brew hot organic tea at night, put it in the fridge so it gets cold, and then in the morning I put it into the blender as a base for my smoothie.

THE HEALTH BENEFITS

There are two important aspects of Sei Mee Tea Edible Green that are worth talking about.

1) Sei Mee Tea Edible Green is a Sencha tea, not a Matcha tea. What’s the difference?

Sencha is exposed to the sun while Matcha is shade-grown or covered.

Also, Sencha has much lower levels of caffeine and higher levels of antioxidants while Matcha is the opposite. Matcha has higher levels of caffeine and lower levels of antioxidants.

So, if you are drinking organic green for the health benefits, you want to be drinking Sencha rather than Matcha.

Additionally, Sei Mee Tea says that Matcha ground tea has 137 times more EGCG (a type of catechin antioxidant) than green tea brewed from bags or leaves.

Since Sencha has more antioxidants than Matcha, that number for Sencha ground tea could potentially contain 200 or more times ECGC than green tea brewed from bags or leaves.

2) As I mentioned above, when we brew green tea leaves and throw them away, we are losing out on a ton of the beneficial properties.

Sei Mee Tea claims that when we brew green tea using traditional methods, via bags or loose leaves, we are not capturing 78% of the healthful components (catechin antioxidants, dietary fibers, theanine, and Vitamins A, C and E) and 96% of EGCG.

Boiling green tea at 185 degrees for three minutes and removing the leaves will only extract 4% of the EGCG, one of the most important antioxidants.

By drinking Sei Mee Tea Edible Green, we are getting 100% of the EGCG since we are consuming the entire leaf in ground form and not throwing anything away.

RADIATION IN THE TEA LEAVES?

One of the most widely read posts that I have written on my site is whether seaweed is safe to eat or not because of the recent earthquake in Japan.

This was the exact question I posed to Kiyomi Koike, founder of Sei Mee Tea, when we spoke on the phone yesterday about the her organic green tea product.

She told me several things.

First, the Sei Mee Tea Edible Green that is on the market now is from the 2010 harvesting season, so there is nothing to worry about. It is expected that this supply will last until the beginning of 2012.

Second, the farms where Sei Mee Tea is grown are 500 miles from the Fukushima nuclear plant and the manufacturing facility is 1,000 miles away in the southwest part of the country.

Third, when the tea from the 2011 harvesting season does come on market, Sei Mee Tea will be doing very strict batch testing of the product to make sure it is not contaminated.

MY TAKE

– I love the taste of Sei Mee Tea Edible Green. It is smooth, clean and doesn’t have the bitterness of most other organic green teas.

– I am huge believer in the medicinal value of tea. There is a reason that it has been around for thousands of years, and the founder’s husband completely cured himself of cancer by drinking Sei Mee Tea Edible Green.

– The notion of throwing out leaves or bags of tea and missing out on a large majority of the health benefits makes a tremendous amount of sense to me.

From what I have been told, the Japanese and Chinese used to eat the tea leaves but stopped doing it because it became an inconvenience and switched to brewing the leaves in hot water.

– Overall, this is an extremely interesting product and has given me a whole new perspective about how tea should be consumed in order to receive the maximum amount of health benefits.

I have been drinking Sei Mee Tea Edible Green every single day since I bought it this past weekend and definitely plan on buying it again. I think it is an amazing product.

—–

Sei Mee Tea Edible Green is available in retail locations nationwide and online, and is certified organic in Japan by JAS.