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I have adopted a layered approach to keep as safe as I can throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. For me, that includes a healthy diet, certain daily supplements, masking in crowded indoor spaces and staying up to date on vaccinations. Now, a new study from Japan published in the journal Scientific Reports shows that drinking green or black tea may be another helpful layer to add to my approach and, hopefully, yours as well.
We all know that green and black tea offer antioxidant compounds and other nutrients to support our overall health and wellness. Many of us drink these teas for a more sustained energy over other caffeinated beverages. Green tea gives us some important reasons to brew a few cups throughout the day, including increased metabolism from EGCG and the calm focus that its nutrient L-Theanine may provide.
This study tested three types of tea — green tea, matcha and black tea — against seven Omicron subvariants. All of these teas showed an impressive decrease in infectivity against each of the subvariants. Freshly brewed sencha green tea, matcha and black tea outperformed bottled green tea, but the bottled green tea still showed some effectiveness.
Interestingly, this study also showed that “BA.1 virus was strongly inactivated in vitro by saliva from healthy volunteers who had just consumed a candy containing either green tea or black tea.” Now, the one caveat to this study is that the protective effect of the teas or the tea candies was short lived. These effects only lasted around five minutes after the drink or candies were finished.
This study certainly gives me a reason to incorporate these teas into my layered approach to COVID. I’ll be ordering a matcha latte next time that I’m in a crowded space like an airport, and I’ll probably be enjoying a piece of green-tea-infused candy at the next concert I attend.
Unfortunately, COVID doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, and as far as I can tell a layered approach that includes many different layers seems to be the best option for the near future. Luckily, a few cups of tea is a tasty new layer that is easy to incorporate into our daily routine for this and many other healthy reasons.
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