It's golf season, hand me a tea!
No, that's not a typo in the title of this blog entry. More on that later. Yes summer is officially here, and golf season is well into "swing", and I did play my first 9 holes yesterday. I can't tell you how well I did because we didn't keep score. I did play all 9 holes with the same ball, which is pretty remarkable. The weather here in the GTA has been awesome and it was great to be outside swinging a club again. Back to the title.....
I recently switched from brewed coffee to tea - two in the morning, one in the afternoon. I did this on May 29 - the day the Tea Association of Canada announced that Health Canada had approved several claimed benefits of drinking tea. You'll find the press release here: http://www.cnw.ca/en/releases/archive/May2007/29/c5790.html
I'm not one to jump on a bandwagon, but had been worried about the caffeine I was getting from all that coffee, and what adverse affects it might be having on my blood pressure. Some had also claimed that I was addicted to coffee, and I wanted to prove them wrong. And hey, if Health Canada says there are health benefits to tea, maybe that was what tipped the scales (or tea cup as the case may be). I won't get into the health benefits here, I'm not a doctor or a scientist. If you're really curious, you're only one Google search away.
Earlier today, after explaining my switch to tea with someone, he told me that tea actually had more caffeine than coffee. You can imagine my reaction! So I immediately devoted my lunch hour to research on the topic. Turns out I wasn't able to find anything to support this claim, but I did stumble upon alot of websites that support the selection of tea over coffee. The most hilarious one I found was this blog entry: http://www.donotremove.net/archives/003827.html. It's great for a laugh!
So how's it going? Well 2 weeks into this experiment, I don't feel any different. I'm not more tired, more alert, and I don't feel more healthy, but the tea is going down just fine. The one nice thing about it is the variety. I'll usually have Orange Pekoe, Earl Grey, and Green Tea. Thanks to the DaVinci Code I know which ones to put milk or lemon in. No two teas taste the same.
To be clear, I haven't completely banned coffee. I have had 3 cups in the last 2 weeks, 2 over breakfast with some friends last week, and one on Sunday morning over breakfast with the inlaws. So call it "consumption for convenience" - because it was there. Also, being Italian, there's no way I'm going to ban espresso based drinks (like espresso straight up, cappuccinos, and lattes). Call that "social consumption" because I never drink it alone, and only occasionally, and apparently thanks to the brewing technique it has less caffeine than your standard double double from Tim Hortons. But I can safely say that tea is my new sidekick, and so far, it's okay!