When we drink matcha, we’re actually drinking a plant. Not the extract of a plant, mind you: the actual plant itself.The leaves of this gorgeous plant are plucked by hand, then steamed to preserve their brilliant color, then dried, then finely ground using specially designed grooved granite wheels. We then simply combine this ground tea (the characters for matcha, literally mean “ground tea”) with hot water, whisk it up a bit, and drink it. We thus ingest the actual leaves, the actual tea.
Bagged teas and loose-leaf teas are in fact prepared as extracts. We put a bag in a cup, or some tea leaves in a pot, pour in hot water, and wait for it to “steep.” The steeping is the leaching of SOME micro and phytonutrients of the leaves themselves. The spent tea bag / spent leaves are then tossed into the compost.
It’s such a shame. Most of the valuable health properties are just thrown away.
There is no tossing of anything with matcha. You drink the plant.
Eating an orange is vastly more beneficial to the human body than is drinking a glass of orange juice. Most of the good stuff is in the fiber. Same with matcha.
And because most of the health benefits of green tea are found in the interaction of soluble fibers and insoluble fibers, matcha — because we drink the plant — has roughly 10 to 20 times (depending on method of measurement) the goodies as regular green tea. So you could drink 10 to 20 cups of green tea a day to get the full effect, or you could have a single cup of matcha. Better yet, you could make one for a treasured friend.
