January 5, 2017 • 52 mins
Read the 1872 ghost story “Green Tea” and you might worry that a fresh cup of Sencha might summon visions of a demonic ghost monkey. But don’t fear! In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian explore the myth and likelihood of green tea hallucinations.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stupwork
dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Seger.
So I had an epiphany a couple of days ago
that's completely turned my life around, and it spawned the
(00:23):
idea for this episode. Ye. Yeah. For the last almost
twenty years, I have believed that if you drink too
much green tea, you will eventually start hallucinating. And uh,
it all came from a horror story that I read
in college in a class. My professor didn't correct that
(00:45):
false assumption that was in this story. We talked about
the story and its contents, but we didn't talk about
the fact that you can't actually hallucinate. Well, we'll get
into that you can. But but green tea was, at
the time Victorian Aire assumed to cause people hallucinations or hysteria.
You know, this is this is interesting because I believe
(01:06):
there was this American Life that aired years back, and
the at least the opening bit was about these little
mistaken ideas that we sometimes have in our head, like
stuff that's it's not important enough that it gets completely
ruled out or corrected. Early on, but you end up
just holding onto it, like in the In the bit,
(01:27):
there was a there was a particular woman who always
thought that unicorns were real. She just she didn't really
look into the matter. She just had it in her mind.
This is a real animal. I've totally met people who
have thought they're real too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this
was like that. And I was so embarrassed when I
realized the truth. But um, I mean, it's not like
I've avoided green tea. In fact, I'm drinking it right
(01:48):
now as we recording this episode. But uh, I've made
sure like I don't drink too much because that's what
I had learned in this class. Well, I mean, moderation
and all things right, And it doesn't seem like it's
that unrealistic. There are plenty of substances where if you
drink too much of it, weird or bad things can happen,
you know, not to people who drink alcohol tend to
(02:09):
know do not drink too much alcohol. If you drink
too much coffee, you may get a bit jit ury
and weird. So the idea that if you drink too
much green tea you might have some level of mild hallucination.
It's not unrealistic, and it turns out that there's a
little bit a little bit of truth to it. But
the the whole myth just spun completely out of control. Uh,
(02:33):
Like I said, during the Victorian era, but primarily because
of this short horror story called Green Tea by Sheridan
Lafanu Uh. He was an Irish writer of Gothic mysteries
and ghost stories. Um. This story was first published in
the United States in five but it was originally published
in England in eighteen seventy two. It was in his
(02:54):
collection called in a Glass Darkly Uh. And just for context,
that public cation that was only a year before he died,
so he was kind of at the end of his life.
I was rereading the story for this episode as well,
and the story contextually, I think takes place much earlier
than that. I think it's like the beginning part of
the nineteenth century. And this is very much a stuffy
(03:19):
British ghost story. When you totally not not to not
to hate on that type of ghost story, sometimes that's
exactly what I'm in the mood for. But this is
a British intellectual encounter of something kind of weird that
challenges his Britishness, but ultimately his Britishness is enough to
overcome the anti Britishness. Yeah. Absolutely. This is one of
(03:39):
those rare stories, especially for the time, to where it's
a horror story, but it chooses science over the supernatural
for its explanation, which is where the whole great Tea
things that comes from. Although it just turns out that
the scientific explanation in this story was just as superficial. Yeah.
I love a good, ultimately phony scientific explanation in an
(04:02):
old horror story. There was a horror movie years and
years back, I guess the nineteen seventies Horror Express. Did
you ever see wonderful film as Christopher Lee in it? Uh?
Teddy Sevalis, Kelly Savalis Uh A Siberian train a hammer movie,
I believe it was. And there's a there's like an
undead Neanderthal type creature and it's it's a lot of fun.
(04:25):
But the big scientific moment is when they discussed that
you can like look at the molecules and you can
basically look at an eye under a microscope and see
the things it saw or something completely ridiculous and totally
blast me out of the movie even in a horror
movie about undead neandertal. Yeah, yeah, no, I think you
(04:46):
know that would be an interesting thing for us to tackle,
is like scientific misassumptions that we've we've had over the
years from various like sci fi, fantasy and uh, horror
explanations for things. So the story Green Tea goes like this,
I'm gonna spoil and almost a hundred and fifty year
old story for you here, so brace yourselves. Uh. There's
(05:09):
this guy named Mr Jennings. He's a clergyman and he
keeps seeing the evil spirit of a monkey. Uh, and
he turns to a doctor for help. The doctor rejects
the idea that something supernatural is happening. Oh. This is
Dr Hacilius, by the way, who's a reoccurring character. He is. Yeah,
the whole book, the whole collection of short stories are
(05:30):
are written from his perspective, I think. And he's kind
of like he's like a proto Sherlock Holmes. But he's
a doctor and he but he knows everything, and he
like he does that Sherlock Holmes thing where he like,
uh just like says a bunch of facts about people
without them like telling him anything just to like show
off how smart he is, how how logical he is. Anyways, Yeah,
(05:52):
so his whole thing is there's nothing supernatural happening here.
What's going on is you've been drinking green tea for
years every night before you go to bed, Mr Jennings,
and it's in your nervous system, and that's what's making
you see this evil monkey and it eventually drives Jenning
to Jennings to commit suicide. Uh. And the end of
the story is essentially the doctor how do how do
(06:14):
you say his name again? Hascilius has Cilius is how
I was reading him. Okay, so he, you know, basically
is like, well there's one for science. Like, it's too
bad that he, you know, killed himself. But he seemed
like a good man. But that's what happens when you
drink too much green tea, you know. I have to
say when I when I went into this story and
I had not I had not read this one previously.
This one was new to me. I was expecting a
(06:36):
far more racist and xenophobic tale. Yeah, and it it
really doesn't have It really doesn't have much in the
way of xenophobia racism at least on the on the surface, Well,
there isn't a lot of if I remember correctly, they
don't even really reference the sort of Chinese origin of
tea in it that much, right, right, Yeah, Like I
went back through it and I did the word search.
(06:57):
It's like, all right, let's see if they're a needs
specific means of Asia China and not so much it. Uh. Now,
it does raise a couple of questions that I think
can point to certain you know, mild racist store xenophobic ideas,
such as drinking a lot of green tea makes you
see ghost monkeys? Then does that mean everyone in in
(07:20):
Asia is walking around seeing ghost monkeys? Are just the
average street in China is just littered with ghost monkey
It's just yeah, it's just a part of everyday life.
And this one guy just couldn't handle it. The ghost
monkey isn't really that malicious, and in fact, I think
there's even a scene where he like goes to touch
it in his hand, just passes through it. Yeah. I mean,
maybe it's the equivalent of the little uh, you know,
(07:41):
the little waving cat toy that you see everything. You
just get used to seeing ghost monkeys everywhere, menacing it.
I think, Um, I think what it speaks to about
the context that this was written and actually is that
xenophobia wasn't overt right, it was just like the Chinese
and the origin of these products was invisible in English
(08:03):
society at that time, and so they just didn't talk
about it, didn't think about it, didn't even consider, oh, well,
we have uh problems with green tea here, but why
would we even think about what's happening with the people
in China drinking it? Right? I think that I think
that's what my explanation would be for why they're not
in there. But there's there's some really interesting stuff contextually
(08:26):
going on with green tea at the time, and so
we're gonna we're gonna establish that first, and then we're
gonna take a look at what's actually going on with
green tea with the caveat that Robert and I quickly
found of researching this episode. There is a lot of
research about green tea out there, like too much for
(08:46):
anyone human being to read in the lifetime. I think, yeah,
if you follow any particular science news outlets, or if
you do you look at the studies that are coming out,
green tea is just always hitting. It's like green tea, coffee,
and red wine pretty much. If you want to find
a study on any of those three things that relates
to any particular part of your anatomy or life or
(09:07):
functionality as a as an organism, it's out there. It
reminds me of this Lewis Black bit that he used
to do about milk, and he would talked right, it's like, yeah,
the study comes out and it says milks good for you,
and then another study comes out and it says milks
bad for you, and it switches back and forth like
every week, and he's just like, I don't know what
to do with this. You know, that was a terrible
Lewis but but yeah, basically green tea is kind of
(09:30):
the same, except for the now we're not getting that
many studies that are like, green tea is bad for you.
We're getting oh, it's so good for you, can do this,
it can do that, it can do this, right, Yeah,
it's the level to which it is good for you.
Yeah yeah. So uh. But what was going on at
the time that Green Tea was written was basically the
medical field was really pulling away from the supernatural and
(09:53):
hyper focusing on science. So that's why you know, we've
talked before about how uh like trace this back a
couple hundred years for this to John d where the
science field at the time very much incorporated aspects of
the supernatural into it. Now at this period of time,
as Victorian era, uh, they're pulling away from that, really
focusing on science. So they're saying voices and visions that
(10:16):
are seen by people were really they were associated with
a false perception of their senses rather than actual ghosts
or demons. And some of the ideas that surrounded this
were connected to human blood and how it circulated from
the heart to the brain. So they're trying to be science,
but they were just you know, it wasn't very empirical.
The idea was um that like when you hang your
(10:37):
head down and then you quickly raise it up, you know,
you see spots or lights because you're getting a head rush.
And this Victorian kind of science explanation was like, oh, well,
that's that's got to be the explanation for problems like
this green t situation. So yeah, the the story itself
seemed progressive for the time, right because he was like, a, ha,
(10:58):
there's no such thing as a. It's like Scooby Doo
at the end, and it's like there's no ghost, it's
green tea. But the medical logic is not correct at all.
And here I am almost a hundred and fifty years
later and I totally bought it for a good chunk
of my life. Um So what was going on was
by the eight seventies there was a shift away from
green tea toward black tea. And the reason why was
(11:22):
black tea was cheaper to produce because it was sourced
directly from British plantations that were in India and Ceylon,
and therefore consumers thought that it was more likely to
be of high quality because they knew where it was
coming from, like these we're British managed plantations, right, and
that it was being cut uh with all kinds of
(11:44):
weird things, various plants, iron filings. Will get to that
in a minute. Going back to this story, though, we
gotta turn to one of our stuff to blow your
mind experts that we often summon up. He's been a
former guest on the show A. S. T. Joshi and Uh.
He wrote in his Unutterable Horror book, he has a
(12:05):
long section about the story Green Tea and leaf a
news writings, and he says, quote, there's a certain amount
of evidence that in a story written only ten years
after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the monkey
represents from a Christian perspective, the rejection or at least
the potential for the rejection of God and the entire
(12:26):
Christian worldview. So that maybe puts a little bit into
perspective about this whole science versus supernatural thing. But then
also I didn't realize this. He points out that Lafoneu
was apparently a follower of this Christian UH like break
off group called sweden borgi Ism I think and UH
(12:49):
named after a guy who from Sweden whose last name
was Swedenborg. Uh. And I didn't have a lot of
time to dive down that shoot, but apparently, uh, Josh
he sees Green Tea as being like a morality tale
from the standpoint of somebody with that belief system. Interesting,
(13:10):
you know. I ran across a two thousand nine gender
studies article by this guy, Daniel Lewis of Ball State University,
and he argued that the story is ultimately about the
need for a closely guarded and bound male body and
identity at the time and read a quick quote from it.
Here says Hissilius argues that there is a fluid whose
(13:31):
nature is spiritual quote though not immaterial, that circulates through
the brain. It is through the abuse of various substances
quote green tea is one that enables a surface of
the brain to be quote unduly exposed on which disembodied
spirits can operate contained within. Hissilius's theories are a warning
(13:52):
for men against the use of foreign substances like green tea.
But we can add the exposure to foreign text and
I he is as well that served to unnaturally expose
areas of the body. To be healthy, the male body
must be regulated, controlled and closed off, not leaky like
Jennings body at the end of the story. Huh. That's
(14:13):
an interesting argument, especially in lieu of what I was
just earlier saying about, like the invisibility of the Chinese
in this story, which is there's no discussion about them
or the origin of this tea. Uh So, that's sort
of like he's implying that exposure to foreign ideas or
(14:33):
materials is the idea behind this story, right, the sort
of the menace behind the story but at the same time,
like it's never explicit, it's just a completely implicit horse story. Yeah,
it's it's interesting to think on the whole, like the
threat of the farm, because of course foreign things do
change you. They open you up to new ideas, and
that's wonderful. I wholly embrace that. But but at the time,
(14:56):
it's interesting to draw that distinction between green and black tea.
When black tea it's elf is an import it is
a foreign thing that has been acquired by the colonial power,
as has so much in the in the domain of
the British Empire. Yeah, and from what I was reading,
you know, ultimately this just comes down to making money, uh,
(15:17):
and that like black tea was Uh, you made more
money off of black tea because it was drier and
it was subsequently easier to pack into a ship, so
you could you could pack more of it for travel
and selling it in Great Britain. And then there was
also the factor of they were saying, well, once we
get the green tea over there, we want to make
it last a little bit longer, so we'll add some
(15:39):
I don't know, hazelwood, or we'll add uh the iron
filings I mentioned earlier into it, and so everybody was
drinking this adulterated green tea, to the point that apparently,
like when when unique sellers would would stand up and say, like,
we are only selling pure green tea, people wouldn't believe
it was green tea because they look at it and go,
(15:59):
that's the wrong color. I don't want that. That's not
actually green tea. Interesting. I mean, of course, it's one
thing we'll touch on getting again here, is that ultimately,
a T is any hot water that has something added
to it, herbs or and and um, you know, dried
leaves of something. Uh. You have various concoctions that are
(16:20):
technically a T if you want to get get even
more vague with your definition. Just a cup of hot
water without anything in it can be and has been
referred to as tea in various texts, particularly and in
Chinese text Yeah. I have a friend I was telling
you about before we went on air who's like a
(16:40):
teen nerd. He's like really hardcore about his tea, and
he would argue that's not true, like it has to
come from the specific plant. It's only tea that like
stuff like you know how you go to like the
grocery store and they have like Breathe Deep tea or
stress relief tea or whatever. Well, that doesn't have the
specific plant in it. It's just a different you know,
mallegation of herbs. Right, And he's like, that's not tea,
(17:04):
Like he's very strict about that. But you're right. In
other cultures people, you know, tea has a lot of
different meanings. Well, well, let's get into it. What is
green tea. Let's let's define the potential monkey summoning substance here. Okay,
so all green tea is the unfermented product of the
(17:24):
Chamelia synensious plant. Might be saying that wrong again, my
latin not the best. But green tea and black tea
are technically made from the same plant, but in a
less processed green form. There's a higher level of the
original substances that are in that plant, which is why
we have these arguments about well, green teas is really
(17:46):
good for you because it has X, Y, and Z
and what will dive deeper down those chemical roots? Uh?
No pun intendant uh later in the episode. But yeah,
essentially it's just it comes from this one plant, uh,
and then it's you know, developed in various ways, Like
I said, black tea's dryer, green tea's weather, or at
least it was in the Victorian or Yeah, it's It's
(18:07):
worth pointing out too that that black tea is actually
red tea in several Asian languages, including Mandarin Chinese. So
in Mandarin, green tea is lucha and red tea is
hong sha, So essentially that's red tea, and it does
have a reddish appearance to Yeah, definitely, I wonder where
(18:29):
the black came from other than just like the difference
between the actual loose dried tea or it may I
guess have to do with just the like the the
fact that many Asian teas, like we're discussing, they seem
to be a weaker concoction. Yeah, and the you know,
the Western is gonna hold of it. They want a stronger,
blacker concoction. Yea. Even then it's like, do you ever
(18:52):
have teeth? It's just really black. No, especially when you
think about coffee in relation. But like like I was
saying before we went on air, I drink my tea
really really better, and I leave like a bag in
basically until I've done drink either drinking from the cup
or from the cattle. I just I don't mind it.
(19:13):
But like you said, like you know, sometimes I'll go
to a Chinese restaurant here in the United States and
they'll serve tea and it's it's fine, but it's like
incredibly weak compared to what I normally drink at home. Yeah. Now,
of course, China is is the sort of the birthplace
of tea culture. It is. It has a rich history
of of of tea cultivation and use recreationally, socially, religiously.
(19:41):
In Chinese mythology, tea is a is sometimes attributed to
the second mythical emperor of the twenty eighth century b c.
E Uh. This is shinnng She who actually came up
in our cannabis episode, remember him. So this is the
guy tea and weed. Yeah, well see, this is the
(20:01):
divine farmer, founder of Chinese herbal medicine. And if you
remember from that past episode, he either he either tasted
hundreds of herbs or thrashed them with his magical whip
in order to learn their property. And according to one legend,
he consumes seventy poisons in a single day in order
to bring herbal medicine into the world. Now, as far
(20:24):
as Key goes, the story is that he he sat
beneath a camellia tree and he boiled water for drinking again,
drinking hot water as as long going to practice in
China for for a number of reasons. But the short
answer is that it's supposed to be good for your health.
But then dried leaves fell from the tree into his
mug or bowl of water, so he smelled it smelled good,
(20:46):
and presumably he'd had sixty nine or fewer poisons that day,
so he said, what heck, I'll give it a taste
to what this is like. Uh. He he liked it,
and the rest is history. There's also a story from
Chinese Buddhism in which boded Harma, the fifth or sixth
century Chinese patriarch of China Buddhism. He is supposedly the
(21:08):
source of the first tea leaves. So, according to the
practice of Chinese Buddhism by Holmes Welch quote, the first
tea plans said to have grown from voted harms eyelashes,
which he cut off to keep himself awake during meditation. Interesting,
now I want to have some eyelash tea I wonder
if you can get that at Whole Foods. It's very
pricey to have a Buddhist patriarch. Actually, well, by the
(21:34):
time it was first introduced in England in the mid
sixteen hundreds, it was mostly green, like what I was saying,
and it remained really popular because both doctors and the
Temperance movement were recommending it, because they're saying, hey, this
is an alternative to stuff like beer, you should drink
green tea instead. Uh. And that's where you know it
(21:55):
had the surge and popularity at first. But then, like
I said, because of these sort of machination is behind
the distribution of green tea. Then the rise of black
tea came along, and I think that's why today you
see more black tea. When you think of black, I
mean black tea is essentially British at this point English
inevitably a foreign important English breakfast. I meant to say, yeah, yeah,
(22:19):
that's certainly that's when I think of black tea. That's
that and Earl Gray are the first thing that popped
into my head. All right, Well, on that note, we're
gonna take a quick break. We're gonna steep some more tea,
maybe you will as well. And when we come back,
we are going to get into this hallucination issue. Can
green tea really summon the monkey spirit? Okay, we're back.
(22:45):
So the reason why this hallucination rumor got started in
the first place and why left anew latched onto it
was there was an actual medical journal article published in
eight thirty nine in the British medical journal The Lancet,
which is pretty well known even today. Uh. And it
(23:07):
was by a guy named George Sigmund, and it was
on the positive and negative effects of tea. And he
wrote that while green tea did have medicinal properties, it
could cause stomach problems and a quote fluttering in the chest. Uh.
And he cited a paper that he had read in
Glasgow Medical Journal of a woman who experienced excruciating stomach
(23:27):
pain and symptoms of hysteria where she was shrieking and
she was perspiring from her forehead. I like that, that's
one of the symptoms. Um. And they attributed it to
her drinking green tea on an empty stomach. And they said, oh,
you had an empty stomach and you didn't dilute your
green tea with milk, cream or sugar. Uh. So the
(23:49):
way they calmed her down was by giving her and
this is a direct quote, six grains of solid opium
and four drachmas of texture that the green tea was
way too much for your Here have some opium that
you know. This is something that came to mind and
in reading the story, because if you want to think
about Asian imports to Britain that can give you an
(24:10):
altered state of mind. I mean, there's opium right there.
You don't even need a mess with the green Yeah. Yeah,
well and certainly I mean there was uh, you know
opium distribution in England at the time as well too.
So yeah, again another like thing that was just kind
of ignored by left Anue in this story. Uh. But
the real problem, like I said, was the tea people
(24:31):
were basically distributing adulterated t right, So uh, you have
this situation, like I said, iron findings, there were also
plants like Hawthorne, and then the other thing that was
making them adulterated was the die that they would add
to them. So you had vertegras, Prussian blue, Dutch pink,
Ferris sulfate, copper carbonate, and then my favorite die to
(24:54):
use on T sheep dung. Apparently the sheep dung was
the one that was the least harmful to the people
drinking it. It was so common, and this is what
I mentioned earlier. It was so common these distributors when
they tried to actually put out the real thing, people
would say, Nope, that's the wrong color. Please add some
sheep dung. Wow. If only they thought to promote what
(25:15):
is it? Is it? Ga macha? Where have you have
the toasted rice and the green tea tea? I don't know,
so wonderful tasting teeth. Yeah, I've just been promoting that
no sheep dung required. Well, yeah, I don't know. There
was all kinds of stuff going on with I mean,
this isn't just tea, Like we're highlighting tea in this episode,
but there's a lot like weird industrial food practices that
(25:36):
just weren't good for people that unlike today where food
is perfect. Actually we're gonna come full circle back around
to this again by the end of the episode. Um,
so okay, So this this causes the reputation of green
tea to grow worse. Green Tea the horror story doesn't
help green tea, all right, Yeah, it's got caffeine in it.
It's a stimulant. It affects our entire central nervous system,
(26:00):
and that probably helps us with alertness, right, But there
is evidence that in some extreme cases, caffeine can cause
nervous twitching, hallucinations, and anxiety. An excessive caffeine can cause tremors, dizziness, confusion, insomnia, restlessness, agitation,
and an irregular heartbeat. But let's be clear here. For
(26:24):
Green Tea to do stuff like this to you, especially hallucinations,
you have to drink a lot of it, right, and
you have to be the kind of person who is
is more likely to experience hallucination. I mean, hallucinations can
occur for a variety of reasons, uh not, all of
which involve illicit substances. And some people are just more
(26:45):
prone to experiencing hallucinations than others. I have found that
I'm I, I seem to be particularly adverse to experiencing
visual hallucinations. And I've never experienced a visual hallucination in
my life. I don't think I have either other than well,
you know, I was blind that time. The story I
told him the exorcism episode last Actually, I guess it
would be a couple of days ago for you guys listening. Yeah.
(27:08):
Other than that, I think the sky turned the night
sky the black turned red for me once, but that
was that's the extent. No crazy goblin monkey spirits anything. Yeah,
I kind of want a monkey spirit. But uh So.
There was a Live Science article actually that came out
in two thousand nine that I referenced for this to
just really like nail down what's going on with caffeine specifically,
(27:30):
which seems to be the only way you can hallucinate
off of green tea. Uh if. The article there they
they did a number of tests on people drinking various
uh doses of caffeine and how much it would take
for them to hallucinate. It was people who drank the
equivalent of three cups of browed coffee a day are
(27:51):
the ones who are more likely to hallucinate, And that
translates into, uh, I believe nine cups of green tea,
So I mean I could see it. I probably don't
break three in a day, so I regularly break three, yeah,
I think. Yeah, A lot of it comes down to
this susceptibility. Yeah, I can't vi is it tea or
(28:11):
coffee for you? Because you drink coffee, right, Generally it's coffee, yeah,
and and often pretty strong coffee. So maybe maybe that's
where the red sky came from. Do you have too
much coffee? Well, that's one interpretation. Um. This also makes
me think back to the Futurama episode where Fry drinks
all the cup of coffee I don't know one. Yeah,
he has something like he gets the unlimited cups of
(28:33):
coffee for the day or a certain amount, and he
spends he spends his his tax refund or on coffee,
and he drinks all these cups of coffee, and it's
a ticker at the bottom, and he reaches the point
where you drinks so much coffee that time stands still,
and he's able to save the day and Russian and
get everyone out of a burning build. You know, that
may explain a lot to me about one of our colleagues,
(28:56):
Holly Fry, who is a big fan of future rama
uh and drinks more coffee than I know anybody else
at this in this office. But she drinks a lot
of coffee. Yeah, maybe maybe she's just trying to make
time stands still. Hey, aren't we all it's true? Uh?
So back to the study the researchers found that people
with a CAFFEINEI in take that was as high as
(29:18):
nine cups of green tea or three cups of brood
coffee a day, whether it came from coffee, tea, chocolate,
or whatever energy drinks or pills, they had a three
times higher tendency to hear voices and see things that
were not there than those who consumed the equivalent of
this much coffee. Right, So this goes back to your point,
(29:40):
which is that there are some people who are just
more susceptible to hallucinations or visions or hearing things than others. Uh.
And so subsequently they found that those people within their
study were the ones who are really susceptible to getting
hit by this caffeine. The other explanation that's connected to
this seems to be tied to caffeine increasing stress, which
(30:02):
causes our bodies to release more cortisol. And and so
the explanation was that people who drink that much caffeine
are more prone to mental health associations because of this
amount of cortisol in their systems. They're stressed out to
begin with. Yeah, I mean when you start trying to
tease apart the way we perceive the world, which you know,
(30:23):
you can sort of get into the argument that that
all perception is essentially hallucination, and what we call an
hallucination is just an abnormal version or reskewed version of that.
You know, there's so many factors that determine that. So
you could have coffee having a direct role or an
indirect role on that manifestation. Maybe we need to do
like that's maybe that's our next Facebook Live is just you,
(30:43):
me and Joe drinking caffeine until one of us hallucination.
The viewers bet on exactly, So I see, you've got
something interesting here connected to the Church of Latter day Saints,
which we seem to be uncovering a lot of really
fascinating facts to them. Yeah, this is if you ever
rich uh you know, not a deep history, but you
(31:04):
still have reached a rich history there. And this is
something that I found when I looked in Oliver sacks
excellent book Hallucinations, which is always one of my go
toos anytime we we cover a topic that gets into
into hallucination. Now Sacks just passed away this year, right, Uh, yeah,
he recently did recently pass pass away. In this book,
he does not really discuss tea much at all, So
(31:27):
I wasn't able to pull out any wonderful nuggets of
caffeine and related hallucination. But I did find out a
wonderful t anecdote. Uh. He points out that obviously, members
of the Church of Latter day Saints substain from tea
and coffee. However, on the long march from the Mormon
Trail to Utah, the pioneers who had eventually found Salt
(31:49):
Lake City, happened upon a roadside herb which they brewed
into what is called has been called Mormon tea. Now,
the herb was actually nothing none other than if fed,
which contains ephedrin, which is chemically akin to amphetamines, and
hallucinations are sometimes an adverse side effect to ephedra. So
(32:11):
that's uh, how possible hallucination scenario they're from drinking tea.
And again, to come back to what we're talking about earlier,
anything essentially, unless you want to get really specific with
your with your with your definition of tea, any hot
water herbal concoction is a T. So there's cocoa tea,
there's there's opium T. You can you can brew a
(32:32):
tea with various psychedelic substances such as uh, mushrooms with psilocybin. Yeah, exactly.
These are all ways to get a t that uh
more or less is guaranteed to give you a an
altered state of consciousness, if not possible hallucinations. Another Facebook
live episode of us doing an ayahuasca ritual. We can
(32:55):
have the three cups. It would be like a ball
cup game, except the set of a ball under the
cup one of them is. I think we would quickly
figure out who got which one. But so you know,
let's review here for a second before I move on.
It seems like the verdict. Can green tea make you hallucinate?
Probably not. I mean, yes, there's enough caffeine in it
(33:17):
that if you drank a lot of it, it's possible.
But let's look back on the green tea story. The
idea there was that this guy was continually drinking green
tea over the course of his life. He was drinking
it every night before bed, and that that built up somehow,
I guess, in his blood stream, and that was what
(33:38):
was causing him to see the evil monkey. Uh, it
doesn't work like that, you know, it's a it's a
one one dose situation. I think in terms of that,
like you have to at the time be drinking at
least nine cups. Yeah, green tea is not They're not
deposits of green tea and a lifelong tea drinker's body
that are building up. Uh. You know, you kind of
(34:00):
get into this similar area where you have the idea
that that the drug use alcohol and drugs that they're
stored and you're fat and the only way to free
yourself from those is to to sign up for some
sort of like a sauna based program where you're gonna
sweat all that out of your your fat cells. It's like,
um reminding me of like sci fi scenarios to where
(34:21):
people take stuff and then it like their bodies like
an incubator for it, and then like they turn into
basically like a harvesting system for where people just shoved uh,
syringes in them and draw out, you know, green tea
out of their blood. All right, Well, on that note,
we're gonna take another quick break and when we come back,
we will explore the the the actual health benefits of
(34:41):
green tea and what some of the science says about it.
So if you're green tea drinker, especially, you're probably aware
of the commercial nature of it being healthy, at least
here in the United States. UM, it's heavily advertised as
(35:01):
being you know, great for you for a variety of reasons.
We're gonna go over this, Like I said, there's just
a ton of literature out there, but we're gonna go
over it kind of review what it does and what
it doesn't, at least in terms of direct evidence. So,
first of all, it is full of antioxidants, and as
such it's linked to health benefits like a lower risk
of stroke and some types of cancer. Uh. It's also
(35:24):
become very popular because people drink it wishing to prevent
cancer and health heart disease. But there are studies that
argue back and forth about these properties, and the experts
say there really isn't direct evidence yet to confirm anything
like a UM. And in fact, there is an interesting
(35:46):
uh right up about the health effects of green tea
in the Salem Press Encyclopedia. And the guy who wrote
that basically said, look, I only trust it if it's
a double blind, placebo controlled study. Uh. And you have
to do that. And he said the one that he
looked at that did prove something, although he wanted more evidence,
was that green team makes short term improvements in your
(36:08):
cholesterol profile, but those benefits disappear after four weeks. Now,
what wasn't clear to me was like, is it like,
you drink green tea one day, it helps you, and
then if you stop drinking green tea four weeks later,
those benefits go away. Or is it like, if you're
a continuous green tea drinker, you get a one time,
(36:28):
four week decrease in cholesterol and then it's just back.
I couldn't. I couldn't discern that from what he was saying.
But one way or the other, this was like the
one study. He was like, this one's for real, guys.
You know a lot of the health marketing around green
tea and just sort of like the the general idea
that green tea has healthy qualities that kind of floats
(36:51):
in the atmosphere around you. I have found myself being
influenced by that at times where I'll be in the
office and I think I should I'll be at home
I have green tea or should I have coffee? And
the little the voice of the I guess the monkey
will whisper in my ear and say, green days a
little healthier. Maybe not much, but maybe just a little.
Who knows. But you like green tea, so why don't
(37:13):
you just go ahead and drink it and you'll feel
like a little bit healthier. Yeah, yeah, man, I'm not
gonna stop thinking about that monkey for a while now.
If you follow us on social media, I posted an
original illustration somebody did of the monkey splashing around inside
a cup of green tea, and I asked people to
guess what we were doing the episode on and the
responses were hilarious. Uh, but yeah, monkey is going to
(37:36):
be our new mascot maybe. By the way, I also
asked the monkey. I said, if I drink the green
tea instead of the coffee, does that mean my teeth
won't become staying And the monkey said, no, there's still
dan it's in the car tea. Your teeth will still
get stained even though it's green and light. At least
he's uh, he's honest. Yeah, he's very truthful about it. Now,
(37:56):
we would have to ask the monkey about these cancer predictions,
because regarding cancer, it seems that green tea shows promise
for treating things like cervical display asia and reducing the
risk of prostate cancer. But again there's conflicting evidence about
whether it has any effect on stomach cancer for instance. Likewise,
researchers haven't found reliable evidence that it reduces breast cancer,
(38:19):
although there's some quote weak evidence that it decreases recurrence
of breast cancer, so maybe not preventing. But if you've
had breast cancer, you have to drink apparently at least
three or more cups a day in order to for
the recurrence to be staved off. Now, there's some other
disease treatments, and honestly, there were so many we might
(38:41):
miss some here, so please let it let us know
if there's something you know that we don't. But one
study looked, for instance, at how effective gargling green tea
is at preventing influenza UH. It showed that those who
did this were less likely developed influenza and less likely
to find friends to go have two with. UH. There's
also some preliminary evidence that it might help prevent colds
(39:04):
and the flu okay, UH weak evidence that chewing green
tea candy can reduce gum inflammation if you have ginger
vitis It's also been proposed as a means of preventing
liver disease, but the evidence isn't all that convincing. They're
now remember, like I said, it's got caffeine in it,
so of course it does affect our entire central nervous system.
(39:26):
This produces alertness. There's also a couple other substances that
are important to note here that are in green tea.
Theo bromine, which is a smooth muscle relaxant, and there's
also theophyline, which is a smooth muscle relaxant that specifically
can cause restricted air passages to open. So it's been
used to treat asthma and it makes breathing easier. So
(39:49):
again I have asthma, and I was like, hey, maybe
again another check in the column for Okay, I'll drink
more green now. Um so yeah. Another study on green
tea is that the polyphanols within it may help prevent
skin cancer if they're applied directly to the skin. So
I think, like you make like a polstice or something
(40:10):
that you put on your skin. This may help protect
the skin from sun damage, but not by physically blocking
ultraviolet light by protect but instead it protects your cells
from it. So it's it's not keeping the light from
hitting your skin, it's doing something to your cells that
prevent them from being damaged by the light. Well, there
seemed to be no shortage of of green tea and
(40:30):
few skin products. Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing is,
there's green tea and a lot of stuff right now.
I think I have shampoo with green tea in it. Yeah,
I'm sure. I'm pretty sure I've seen that as well.
Now I've there have also been studies that have found
associations between consuming green tea and reduced risk for several
different cancers. We've mentioned skin already, breast, long colon esophagal bladder. Uh,
(40:56):
there have been a lot of studies, and you know,
there seems to be in asociation there. Again, nobody's arguing
there is a magical property and green tea that is
just wiping out cancer cells left and right. But there
is this one amino acid in it called l theonine
that seems to be pretty powerful. Uh. And I I
(41:19):
went through an academic paper specifically on this it's properties
and green tea and what it's potentially doing in the brain.
So we'll cover this as well, this one is a
big nine comes up a lot with supplements. You can
go and get plenty of just either straight up or
alfonine and infuse supplements. Well, what's interesting about it is,
you know those other studies focused mainly on physical disease,
(41:42):
right cancer and UH disease treatments like influenza, but uh,
this amino acid relieves anxiety and calms us. But then
it also improves our alertness, So on top of the caffeine,
you're getting some alertness from this as well. It closely
res mbles the chemical glutamate, which signals excitation in our
(42:04):
brains as a neurotransmitter, so l phonine does the opposite
as of glutamate. It binds in the same receptors in
our brain as glutamate and therefore it blocks them from
receiving its effects. This inhibition is assisted by it also
stimulating the production of the neurotransmitter GABBA G A B A,
(42:27):
which also has common effects. So between those two or
three you know side effects. Apparently green tea calms you down. Yeah,
I mean those I feel like you have three or
four different supplement bottles. They're all present in readily available
and cheaper green tea. Uh. You know. The benefit here
is that unlike taking in anti anxiety drugs, green tea
(42:50):
and the l phonine within it produces the alertness instead
of sleepiness, so it doesn't impair your motor behavior. For instance.
So I don't know, if you're driving and you're stressed out,
but you don't want to fall asleep, drink some green tea. Additionally,
it seems to prevent the abrupt rise in blood pressure
that's associated with stress. And this is good because it
prevents arterial damage from the surging blood pressure in your body.
(43:12):
And that's not something I like to think about that.
I don't know. For some reason that that squixx me
out the idea of just like my blood pressure like
pushing so hard that it's like ripping my vessels apart.
That's what that would that would That's that's a horrifying image.
It seems unpleasant. There is also some evidence that it
influences how genes are expressed, specifically in the amygdala and
(43:34):
the hippocampus, and these, remember are the parts of the brain.
They're associated with fear aggression in memory, So it could
be used to treat stress, but also PTSD. There's some
people looking into green tea and how it might help
with that. This again we keep coming back to. This
reminds me of m D m A and the theory
surrounding that treating PTSD. So it's currently the subject of
(43:58):
human studies also with patients who have schizophrenia, so there's
some idea that it might be able to help them
as well. And get this, we know stress effects cognition,
but not only does l phonine reverse that kind of
impairment due to its relationship with glutamate, but it may
also be able to prevent damage to brain cells that
(44:20):
is induced from exposure to toxic levels of aluminum. So
like if you're breathing in an aluminum and it's like
potentially causing brain damage if you theoretically if you drink
green tea, it can prevent that damage from occurring. Uh.
It can also reduce the impact of having a stroke.
A stroke is where there's blockage of blood to our brain.
(44:44):
This results in the death of our brain cells. But
l phonine signals our endo field cells to constrict or
relax appropriately as our blood is flowing. So go back
to my my horrific imagery earlier. Your blood vessels are
basically accommodating for the rush of blood no matter what
it's I guess velocity. The velocity of blood is uh.
(45:07):
And specifically in animal studies, if you administer l PHI
and I up to twelve hours after an animal has
a stroke, it can protect their brain cells and reduce
the size of their damaged brain areas. So it seems
like it's pretty potent stuff. There's definitely something going on
here with green tea. Ah, it's okay, So we've we've
(45:30):
determined it's probably not gonna make you hallucinate unless you
binge drink it. And even then maybe UH and I
do not attempt to hallucinate just by bench drinking green tea.
We're not advocating if you're gonna get sick of green
tea before you see anything funny. Um. But then, like,
even though science hasn't really nailed down the research on this,
(45:55):
there seems to be a lot of good qualities to it. Yeah,
And like I said, you can pretty much look for
a green tea study about anything and you may very
well find it. For instance, I was looking around, there's
there's a study out there about the effect of green
tea on supplement absorption. Uh, there's a there's a particular
study two thousand fifteen looks at green tea is a
(46:16):
way to improve in our eyes. They received. Researchers in
this case successful use compounds from green tea to help uh,
image cancer tumors in mice. Also, I've seen it can
help fight glucoma. Really that the studies are all over
the place. We could do an entire podcast just on
you know, episode after episode of Green Teeth, every Green
(46:37):
Tea research that has come out. Yeah, but we're not
actually going to do that. Yeah, that's a that's another
show for another network. Um, all right, let's close out. Then.
Does it have health benefits? Seems so yeah. Will it
cause hallucination of evil monkey spirits? Doubtful? Probably not. But
let's remember that this is being pushed pretty hard commercially
(46:58):
right now, so much so that manufacturers are currently offering
the extracts and pillform right. We see these in like
a supplement stores and stuff like that. You could probably
even get them at the grocery store at this point.
Oh yeah, you can buy this stuff in Amazon, but
you should know and and this is where it circles
back again to those guys in the Victorian area throwing
(47:18):
iron filings and Prussian blue into their and cheap dounge
into their green tea. In a two thousand and six
analysis that tested green tea extract products, they found that
some of them were contaminated with lead. Uh and this
or something else about these specific extracts is potentially leading
(47:39):
to liver inflammation. So again, like everything in moderation, Yeah,
and it comes back to a theme that's it's come
up a lot recently. It came up on the second
Dangerous Food episode that Joe and I did, is that
green tea is a food product. You know where your
food products came from. The more the more access, the
(48:00):
more unrecognizable that food product is, the more I'm not
saying it's definitely bad, but the more questions there are
to potentially answer there. This is true. Every time I
eat a vegetarian meat loaf, I wonder what's actually in
this the meat of a vegetarian of course, if that's
another hard story, and you know this is something I'm
(48:23):
meant to bring up earlier. I feel like the green
tea short story that we started with the way that
it was inspired by this article in the Lancet. It
makes me think that had this been the nineteen seventies,
sixties or fifties, the Green Tea would have definitely been
a B movie or an exploitation, because that's where you
(48:43):
you often see these ideas and these new new studies
sometimes at least very weakly resonate for the first time, uh,
the first place that the sort of the media you know,
collective consciousness actually thinks about it for us. Second, I
for one, would really like to see like an exploitative
(49:05):
green tea horror movie. But despite that, let's let's learn
from my mistake, uh, and and know that you can
drink this stuff and it's gonna be okay, Like you're
not gonna start seeing evil monkeys anytime soon. Although uh please,
if anybody out there wants to send us our new
(49:26):
avatar of the Green Tea evil monkey, we we won't
discourage that. I would also love left to know does
anyone out there drink their green tea recordly out of
a hideous monkey mug? That would that would be perfect,
very nice. I kind of want one myself, all right,
So tell us about your monkey mugs or send us
your monkey images. Uh you canna get in touch with
(49:47):
us on all of our social platforms. We're on Facebook,
we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. Uh,
you can find all of those on stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where
we've got every episode of the podcast, every video that
we've ever done, and all of the various blog posts
(50:08):
that we have done as well that are connected to
the podcasts and other interests of ours. That's right, it's
a it's a new year. This is the first episode
of the New Year that we are recording. Do you
have any New Year's resolutions? Do you engage in that
sort of thing? I don't, but I gotta say, after
doing all the research on this, I will be drinking
more green tea. I feel like I probably will as well,
(50:31):
So I'll add that to my my other actual resolution,
which is too blind the mechanical eye of every automatic
toilet I encounter the entire year. Yeah, how are you
going to do that? You have like a like a
sewing needle. No, I mean it would be tempting to
go complete, you know, Odysseus on it and stab it
(50:51):
and stab the cyclopean eye out. I think I'm gonna
just gonna put stickers and duct tape over them, because
I think as responsible humans, we have the power. We
have the right to flush the toilet when and where
we want, when when we want to flush it, to
to judge the contents of the toilet, and and actually
push a button, not have the toilet go off at
(51:13):
odd times while we are potentially setting upon it. You're
referring specifically to our bathrooms here at work because they
are sensitive. They are sensitive to the point where it's
getting to where I cannot I cannot sit on a
toilet anywhere, and the smallest noise in the background will
make me think, oh goodness, is toilets about the plush?
I better hop up out of the sea because when
(51:34):
it flushes here too, the toilet splashed the ceiling. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
You're You're in for a hurricane of toilet water. It's
mechanical tyranny, and I'm not gonna take it anymore. Well,
let us know. There's one other way to let us
know if you want to support Robert in his fight
against the toilets, and that's by writing us at Blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
(52:05):
on this and thousands of other topics, is that how
stuff works. Dot com b
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stupwork
dot com. Hey you welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I am Christian Seger.
So I had an epiphany a couple of days ago
that's completely turned my life around, and it spawned the
(00:23):
idea for this episode. Ye. Yeah. For the last almost
twenty years, I have believed that if you drink too
much green tea, you will eventually start hallucinating. And uh,
it all came from a horror story that I read
in college in a class. My professor didn't correct that
(00:45):
false assumption that was in this story. We talked about
the story and its contents, but we didn't talk about
the fact that you can't actually hallucinate. Well, we'll get
into that you can. But but green tea was, at
the time Victorian Aire assumed to cause people hallucinations or hysteria.
You know, this is this is interesting because I believe
(01:06):
there was this American Life that aired years back, and
the at least the opening bit was about these little
mistaken ideas that we sometimes have in our head, like
stuff that's it's not important enough that it gets completely
ruled out or corrected. Early on, but you end up
just holding onto it, like in the In the bit,
(01:27):
there was a there was a particular woman who always
thought that unicorns were real. She just she didn't really
look into the matter. She just had it in her mind.
This is a real animal. I've totally met people who
have thought they're real too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this
was like that. And I was so embarrassed when I
realized the truth. But um, I mean, it's not like
I've avoided green tea. In fact, I'm drinking it right
(01:48):
now as we recording this episode. But uh, I've made
sure like I don't drink too much because that's what
I had learned in this class. Well, I mean, moderation
and all things right, And it doesn't seem like it's
that unrealistic. There are plenty of substances where if you
drink too much of it, weird or bad things can happen,
you know, not to people who drink alcohol tend to
(02:09):
know do not drink too much alcohol. If you drink
too much coffee, you may get a bit jit ury
and weird. So the idea that if you drink too
much green tea you might have some level of mild hallucination.
It's not unrealistic, and it turns out that there's a
little bit a little bit of truth to it. But
the the whole myth just spun completely out of control. Uh,
(02:33):
Like I said, during the Victorian era, but primarily because
of this short horror story called Green Tea by Sheridan
Lafanu Uh. He was an Irish writer of Gothic mysteries
and ghost stories. Um. This story was first published in
the United States in five but it was originally published
in England in eighteen seventy two. It was in his
(02:54):
collection called in a Glass Darkly Uh. And just for context,
that public cation that was only a year before he died,
so he was kind of at the end of his life.
I was rereading the story for this episode as well,
and the story contextually, I think takes place much earlier
than that. I think it's like the beginning part of
the nineteenth century. And this is very much a stuffy
(03:19):
British ghost story. When you totally not not to not
to hate on that type of ghost story, sometimes that's
exactly what I'm in the mood for. But this is
a British intellectual encounter of something kind of weird that
challenges his Britishness, but ultimately his Britishness is enough to
overcome the anti Britishness. Yeah. Absolutely. This is one of
(03:39):
those rare stories, especially for the time, to where it's
a horror story, but it chooses science over the supernatural
for its explanation, which is where the whole great Tea
things that comes from. Although it just turns out that
the scientific explanation in this story was just as superficial. Yeah.
I love a good, ultimately phony scientific explanation in an
(04:02):
old horror story. There was a horror movie years and
years back, I guess the nineteen seventies Horror Express. Did
you ever see wonderful film as Christopher Lee in it? Uh?
Teddy Sevalis, Kelly Savalis Uh A Siberian train a hammer movie,
I believe it was. And there's a there's like an
undead Neanderthal type creature and it's it's a lot of fun.
(04:25):
But the big scientific moment is when they discussed that
you can like look at the molecules and you can
basically look at an eye under a microscope and see
the things it saw or something completely ridiculous and totally
blast me out of the movie even in a horror
movie about undead neandertal. Yeah, yeah, no, I think you
(04:46):
know that would be an interesting thing for us to tackle,
is like scientific misassumptions that we've we've had over the
years from various like sci fi, fantasy and uh, horror
explanations for things. So the story Green Tea goes like this,
I'm gonna spoil and almost a hundred and fifty year
old story for you here, so brace yourselves. Uh. There's
(05:09):
this guy named Mr Jennings. He's a clergyman and he
keeps seeing the evil spirit of a monkey. Uh, and
he turns to a doctor for help. The doctor rejects
the idea that something supernatural is happening. Oh. This is
Dr Hacilius, by the way, who's a reoccurring character. He is. Yeah,
the whole book, the whole collection of short stories are
(05:30):
are written from his perspective, I think. And he's kind
of like he's like a proto Sherlock Holmes. But he's
a doctor and he but he knows everything, and he
like he does that Sherlock Holmes thing where he like,
uh just like says a bunch of facts about people
without them like telling him anything just to like show
off how smart he is, how how logical he is. Anyways, Yeah,
(05:52):
so his whole thing is there's nothing supernatural happening here.
What's going on is you've been drinking green tea for
years every night before you go to bed, Mr Jennings,
and it's in your nervous system, and that's what's making
you see this evil monkey and it eventually drives Jenning
to Jennings to commit suicide. Uh. And the end of
the story is essentially the doctor how do how do
(06:14):
you say his name again? Hascilius has Cilius is how
I was reading him. Okay, so he, you know, basically
is like, well there's one for science. Like, it's too
bad that he, you know, killed himself. But he seemed
like a good man. But that's what happens when you
drink too much green tea, you know. I have to
say when I when I went into this story and
I had not I had not read this one previously.
This one was new to me. I was expecting a
(06:36):
far more racist and xenophobic tale. Yeah, and it it
really doesn't have It really doesn't have much in the
way of xenophobia racism at least on the on the surface, Well,
there isn't a lot of if I remember correctly, they
don't even really reference the sort of Chinese origin of
tea in it that much, right, right, Yeah, Like I
went back through it and I did the word search.
(06:57):
It's like, all right, let's see if they're a needs
specific means of Asia China and not so much it. Uh. Now,
it does raise a couple of questions that I think
can point to certain you know, mild racist store xenophobic ideas,
such as drinking a lot of green tea makes you
see ghost monkeys? Then does that mean everyone in in
(07:20):
Asia is walking around seeing ghost monkeys? Are just the
average street in China is just littered with ghost monkey
It's just yeah, it's just a part of everyday life.
And this one guy just couldn't handle it. The ghost
monkey isn't really that malicious, and in fact, I think
there's even a scene where he like goes to touch
it in his hand, just passes through it. Yeah. I mean,
maybe it's the equivalent of the little uh, you know,
(07:41):
the little waving cat toy that you see everything. You
just get used to seeing ghost monkeys everywhere, menacing it.
I think, Um, I think what it speaks to about
the context that this was written and actually is that
xenophobia wasn't overt right, it was just like the Chinese
and the origin of these products was invisible in English
(08:03):
society at that time, and so they just didn't talk
about it, didn't think about it, didn't even consider, oh, well,
we have uh problems with green tea here, but why
would we even think about what's happening with the people
in China drinking it? Right? I think that I think
that's what my explanation would be for why they're not
in there. But there's there's some really interesting stuff contextually
(08:26):
going on with green tea at the time, and so
we're gonna we're gonna establish that first, and then we're
gonna take a look at what's actually going on with
green tea with the caveat that Robert and I quickly
found of researching this episode. There is a lot of
research about green tea out there, like too much for
(08:46):
anyone human being to read in the lifetime. I think, yeah,
if you follow any particular science news outlets, or if
you do you look at the studies that are coming out,
green tea is just always hitting. It's like green tea, coffee,
and red wine pretty much. If you want to find
a study on any of those three things that relates
to any particular part of your anatomy or life or
(09:07):
functionality as a as an organism, it's out there. It
reminds me of this Lewis Black bit that he used
to do about milk, and he would talked right, it's like, yeah,
the study comes out and it says milks good for you,
and then another study comes out and it says milks
bad for you, and it switches back and forth like
every week, and he's just like, I don't know what
to do with this. You know, that was a terrible
Lewis but but yeah, basically green tea is kind of
(09:30):
the same, except for the now we're not getting that
many studies that are like, green tea is bad for you.
We're getting oh, it's so good for you, can do this,
it can do that, it can do this, right, Yeah,
it's the level to which it is good for you.
Yeah yeah. So uh. But what was going on at
the time that Green Tea was written was basically the
medical field was really pulling away from the supernatural and
(09:53):
hyper focusing on science. So that's why you know, we've
talked before about how uh like trace this back a
couple hundred years for this to John d where the
science field at the time very much incorporated aspects of
the supernatural into it. Now at this period of time,
as Victorian era, uh, they're pulling away from that, really
focusing on science. So they're saying voices and visions that
(10:16):
are seen by people were really they were associated with
a false perception of their senses rather than actual ghosts
or demons. And some of the ideas that surrounded this
were connected to human blood and how it circulated from
the heart to the brain. So they're trying to be science,
but they were just you know, it wasn't very empirical.
The idea was um that like when you hang your
(10:37):
head down and then you quickly raise it up, you know,
you see spots or lights because you're getting a head rush.
And this Victorian kind of science explanation was like, oh, well,
that's that's got to be the explanation for problems like
this green t situation. So yeah, the the story itself
seemed progressive for the time, right because he was like, a, ha,
(10:58):
there's no such thing as a. It's like Scooby Doo
at the end, and it's like there's no ghost, it's
green tea. But the medical logic is not correct at all.
And here I am almost a hundred and fifty years
later and I totally bought it for a good chunk
of my life. Um So what was going on was
by the eight seventies there was a shift away from
green tea toward black tea. And the reason why was
(11:22):
black tea was cheaper to produce because it was sourced
directly from British plantations that were in India and Ceylon,
and therefore consumers thought that it was more likely to
be of high quality because they knew where it was
coming from, like these we're British managed plantations, right, and
that it was being cut uh with all kinds of
(11:44):
weird things, various plants, iron filings. Will get to that
in a minute. Going back to this story, though, we
gotta turn to one of our stuff to blow your
mind experts that we often summon up. He's been a
former guest on the show A. S. T. Joshi and Uh.
He wrote in his Unutterable Horror book, he has a
(12:05):
long section about the story Green Tea and leaf a
news writings, and he says, quote, there's a certain amount
of evidence that in a story written only ten years
after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, the monkey
represents from a Christian perspective, the rejection or at least
the potential for the rejection of God and the entire
(12:26):
Christian worldview. So that maybe puts a little bit into
perspective about this whole science versus supernatural thing. But then
also I didn't realize this. He points out that Lafoneu
was apparently a follower of this Christian UH like break
off group called sweden borgi Ism I think and UH
(12:49):
named after a guy who from Sweden whose last name
was Swedenborg. Uh. And I didn't have a lot of
time to dive down that shoot, but apparently, uh, Josh
he sees Green Tea as being like a morality tale
from the standpoint of somebody with that belief system. Interesting,
(13:10):
you know. I ran across a two thousand nine gender
studies article by this guy, Daniel Lewis of Ball State University,
and he argued that the story is ultimately about the
need for a closely guarded and bound male body and
identity at the time and read a quick quote from it.
Here says Hissilius argues that there is a fluid whose
(13:31):
nature is spiritual quote though not immaterial, that circulates through
the brain. It is through the abuse of various substances
quote green tea is one that enables a surface of
the brain to be quote unduly exposed on which disembodied
spirits can operate contained within. Hissilius's theories are a warning
(13:52):
for men against the use of foreign substances like green tea.
But we can add the exposure to foreign text and
I he is as well that served to unnaturally expose
areas of the body. To be healthy, the male body
must be regulated, controlled and closed off, not leaky like
Jennings body at the end of the story. Huh. That's
(14:13):
an interesting argument, especially in lieu of what I was
just earlier saying about, like the invisibility of the Chinese
in this story, which is there's no discussion about them
or the origin of this tea. Uh So, that's sort
of like he's implying that exposure to foreign ideas or
(14:33):
materials is the idea behind this story, right, the sort
of the menace behind the story but at the same time,
like it's never explicit, it's just a completely implicit horse story. Yeah,
it's it's interesting to think on the whole, like the
threat of the farm, because of course foreign things do
change you. They open you up to new ideas, and
that's wonderful. I wholly embrace that. But but at the time,
(14:56):
it's interesting to draw that distinction between green and black tea.
When black tea it's elf is an import it is
a foreign thing that has been acquired by the colonial power,
as has so much in the in the domain of
the British Empire. Yeah, and from what I was reading,
you know, ultimately this just comes down to making money, uh,
(15:17):
and that like black tea was Uh, you made more
money off of black tea because it was drier and
it was subsequently easier to pack into a ship, so
you could you could pack more of it for travel
and selling it in Great Britain. And then there was
also the factor of they were saying, well, once we
get the green tea over there, we want to make
it last a little bit longer, so we'll add some
(15:39):
I don't know, hazelwood, or we'll add uh the iron
filings I mentioned earlier into it, and so everybody was
drinking this adulterated green tea, to the point that apparently,
like when when unique sellers would would stand up and say, like,
we are only selling pure green tea, people wouldn't believe
it was green tea because they look at it and go,
(15:59):
that's the wrong color. I don't want that. That's not
actually green tea. Interesting. I mean, of course, it's one
thing we'll touch on getting again here, is that ultimately,
a T is any hot water that has something added
to it, herbs or and and um, you know, dried
leaves of something. Uh. You have various concoctions that are
(16:20):
technically a T if you want to get get even
more vague with your definition. Just a cup of hot
water without anything in it can be and has been
referred to as tea in various texts, particularly and in
Chinese text Yeah. I have a friend I was telling
you about before we went on air who's like a
(16:40):
teen nerd. He's like really hardcore about his tea, and
he would argue that's not true, like it has to
come from the specific plant. It's only tea that like
stuff like you know how you go to like the
grocery store and they have like Breathe Deep tea or
stress relief tea or whatever. Well, that doesn't have the
specific plant in it. It's just a different you know,
mallegation of herbs. Right, And he's like, that's not tea,
(17:04):
Like he's very strict about that. But you're right. In
other cultures people, you know, tea has a lot of
different meanings. Well, well, let's get into it. What is
green tea. Let's let's define the potential monkey summoning substance here. Okay,
so all green tea is the unfermented product of the
(17:24):
Chamelia synensious plant. Might be saying that wrong again, my
latin not the best. But green tea and black tea
are technically made from the same plant, but in a
less processed green form. There's a higher level of the
original substances that are in that plant, which is why
we have these arguments about well, green teas is really
(17:46):
good for you because it has X, Y, and Z
and what will dive deeper down those chemical roots? Uh?
No pun intendant uh later in the episode. But yeah,
essentially it's just it comes from this one plant, uh,
and then it's you know, developed in various ways, Like
I said, black tea's dryer, green tea's weather, or at
least it was in the Victorian or Yeah, it's It's
(18:07):
worth pointing out too that that black tea is actually
red tea in several Asian languages, including Mandarin Chinese. So
in Mandarin, green tea is lucha and red tea is
hong sha, So essentially that's red tea, and it does
have a reddish appearance to Yeah, definitely, I wonder where
(18:29):
the black came from other than just like the difference
between the actual loose dried tea or it may I
guess have to do with just the like the the
fact that many Asian teas, like we're discussing, they seem
to be a weaker concoction. Yeah, and the you know,
the Western is gonna hold of it. They want a stronger,
blacker concoction. Yea. Even then it's like, do you ever
(18:52):
have teeth? It's just really black. No, especially when you
think about coffee in relation. But like like I was
saying before we went on air, I drink my tea
really really better, and I leave like a bag in
basically until I've done drink either drinking from the cup
or from the cattle. I just I don't mind it.
(19:13):
But like you said, like you know, sometimes I'll go
to a Chinese restaurant here in the United States and
they'll serve tea and it's it's fine, but it's like
incredibly weak compared to what I normally drink at home. Yeah. Now,
of course, China is is the sort of the birthplace
of tea culture. It is. It has a rich history
of of of tea cultivation and use recreationally, socially, religiously.
(19:41):
In Chinese mythology, tea is a is sometimes attributed to
the second mythical emperor of the twenty eighth century b c.
E Uh. This is shinnng She who actually came up
in our cannabis episode, remember him. So this is the
guy tea and weed. Yeah, well see, this is the
(20:01):
divine farmer, founder of Chinese herbal medicine. And if you
remember from that past episode, he either he either tasted
hundreds of herbs or thrashed them with his magical whip
in order to learn their property. And according to one legend,
he consumes seventy poisons in a single day in order
to bring herbal medicine into the world. Now, as far
(20:24):
as Key goes, the story is that he he sat
beneath a camellia tree and he boiled water for drinking again,
drinking hot water as as long going to practice in
China for for a number of reasons. But the short
answer is that it's supposed to be good for your health.
But then dried leaves fell from the tree into his
mug or bowl of water, so he smelled it smelled good,
(20:46):
and presumably he'd had sixty nine or fewer poisons that day,
so he said, what heck, I'll give it a taste
to what this is like. Uh. He he liked it,
and the rest is history. There's also a story from
Chinese Buddhism in which boded Harma, the fifth or sixth
century Chinese patriarch of China Buddhism. He is supposedly the
(21:08):
source of the first tea leaves. So, according to the
practice of Chinese Buddhism by Holmes Welch quote, the first
tea plans said to have grown from voted harms eyelashes,
which he cut off to keep himself awake during meditation. Interesting,
now I want to have some eyelash tea I wonder
if you can get that at Whole Foods. It's very
pricey to have a Buddhist patriarch. Actually, well, by the
(21:34):
time it was first introduced in England in the mid
sixteen hundreds, it was mostly green, like what I was saying,
and it remained really popular because both doctors and the
Temperance movement were recommending it, because they're saying, hey, this
is an alternative to stuff like beer, you should drink
green tea instead. Uh. And that's where you know it
(21:55):
had the surge and popularity at first. But then, like
I said, because of these sort of machination is behind
the distribution of green tea. Then the rise of black
tea came along, and I think that's why today you
see more black tea. When you think of black, I
mean black tea is essentially British at this point English
inevitably a foreign important English breakfast. I meant to say, yeah, yeah,
(22:19):
that's certainly that's when I think of black tea. That's
that and Earl Gray are the first thing that popped
into my head. All right, Well, on that note, we're
gonna take a quick break. We're gonna steep some more tea,
maybe you will as well. And when we come back,
we are going to get into this hallucination issue. Can
green tea really summon the monkey spirit? Okay, we're back.
(22:45):
So the reason why this hallucination rumor got started in
the first place and why left anew latched onto it
was there was an actual medical journal article published in
eight thirty nine in the British medical journal The Lancet,
which is pretty well known even today. Uh. And it
(23:07):
was by a guy named George Sigmund, and it was
on the positive and negative effects of tea. And he
wrote that while green tea did have medicinal properties, it
could cause stomach problems and a quote fluttering in the chest. Uh.
And he cited a paper that he had read in
Glasgow Medical Journal of a woman who experienced excruciating stomach
(23:27):
pain and symptoms of hysteria where she was shrieking and
she was perspiring from her forehead. I like that, that's
one of the symptoms. Um. And they attributed it to
her drinking green tea on an empty stomach. And they said, oh,
you had an empty stomach and you didn't dilute your
green tea with milk, cream or sugar. Uh. So the
(23:49):
way they calmed her down was by giving her and
this is a direct quote, six grains of solid opium
and four drachmas of texture that the green tea was
way too much for your Here have some opium that
you know. This is something that came to mind and
in reading the story, because if you want to think
about Asian imports to Britain that can give you an
(24:10):
altered state of mind. I mean, there's opium right there.
You don't even need a mess with the green Yeah. Yeah,
well and certainly I mean there was uh, you know
opium distribution in England at the time as well too.
So yeah, again another like thing that was just kind
of ignored by left Anue in this story. Uh. But
the real problem, like I said, was the tea people
(24:31):
were basically distributing adulterated t right, So uh, you have
this situation, like I said, iron findings, there were also
plants like Hawthorne, and then the other thing that was
making them adulterated was the die that they would add
to them. So you had vertegras, Prussian blue, Dutch pink,
Ferris sulfate, copper carbonate, and then my favorite die to
(24:54):
use on T sheep dung. Apparently the sheep dung was
the one that was the least harmful to the people
drinking it. It was so common, and this is what
I mentioned earlier. It was so common these distributors when
they tried to actually put out the real thing, people
would say, Nope, that's the wrong color. Please add some
sheep dung. Wow. If only they thought to promote what
(25:15):
is it? Is it? Ga macha? Where have you have
the toasted rice and the green tea tea? I don't know,
so wonderful tasting teeth. Yeah, I've just been promoting that
no sheep dung required. Well, yeah, I don't know. There
was all kinds of stuff going on with I mean,
this isn't just tea, Like we're highlighting tea in this episode,
but there's a lot like weird industrial food practices that
(25:36):
just weren't good for people that unlike today where food
is perfect. Actually we're gonna come full circle back around
to this again by the end of the episode. Um,
so okay, So this this causes the reputation of green
tea to grow worse. Green Tea the horror story doesn't
help green tea, all right, Yeah, it's got caffeine in it.
It's a stimulant. It affects our entire central nervous system,
(26:00):
and that probably helps us with alertness, right, But there
is evidence that in some extreme cases, caffeine can cause
nervous twitching, hallucinations, and anxiety. An excessive caffeine can cause tremors, dizziness, confusion, insomnia, restlessness, agitation,
and an irregular heartbeat. But let's be clear here. For
(26:24):
Green Tea to do stuff like this to you, especially hallucinations,
you have to drink a lot of it, right, and
you have to be the kind of person who is
is more likely to experience hallucination. I mean, hallucinations can
occur for a variety of reasons, uh not, all of
which involve illicit substances. And some people are just more
(26:45):
prone to experiencing hallucinations than others. I have found that
I'm I, I seem to be particularly adverse to experiencing
visual hallucinations. And I've never experienced a visual hallucination in
my life. I don't think I have either other than well,
you know, I was blind that time. The story I
told him the exorcism episode last Actually, I guess it
would be a couple of days ago for you guys listening. Yeah.
(27:08):
Other than that, I think the sky turned the night
sky the black turned red for me once, but that
was that's the extent. No crazy goblin monkey spirits anything. Yeah,
I kind of want a monkey spirit. But uh So.
There was a Live Science article actually that came out
in two thousand nine that I referenced for this to
just really like nail down what's going on with caffeine specifically,
(27:30):
which seems to be the only way you can hallucinate
off of green tea. Uh if. The article there they
they did a number of tests on people drinking various
uh doses of caffeine and how much it would take
for them to hallucinate. It was people who drank the
equivalent of three cups of browed coffee a day are
(27:51):
the ones who are more likely to hallucinate, And that
translates into, uh, I believe nine cups of green tea,
So I mean I could see it. I probably don't
break three in a day, so I regularly break three, yeah,
I think. Yeah, A lot of it comes down to
this susceptibility. Yeah, I can't vi is it tea or
(28:11):
coffee for you? Because you drink coffee, right, Generally it's coffee, yeah,
and and often pretty strong coffee. So maybe maybe that's
where the red sky came from. Do you have too
much coffee? Well, that's one interpretation. Um. This also makes
me think back to the Futurama episode where Fry drinks
all the cup of coffee I don't know one. Yeah,
he has something like he gets the unlimited cups of
(28:33):
coffee for the day or a certain amount, and he
spends he spends his his tax refund or on coffee,
and he drinks all these cups of coffee, and it's
a ticker at the bottom, and he reaches the point
where you drinks so much coffee that time stands still,
and he's able to save the day and Russian and
get everyone out of a burning build. You know, that
may explain a lot to me about one of our colleagues,
(28:56):
Holly Fry, who is a big fan of future rama
uh and drinks more coffee than I know anybody else
at this in this office. But she drinks a lot
of coffee. Yeah, maybe maybe she's just trying to make
time stands still. Hey, aren't we all it's true? Uh?
So back to the study the researchers found that people
with a CAFFEINEI in take that was as high as
(29:18):
nine cups of green tea or three cups of brood
coffee a day, whether it came from coffee, tea, chocolate,
or whatever energy drinks or pills, they had a three
times higher tendency to hear voices and see things that
were not there than those who consumed the equivalent of
this much coffee. Right, So this goes back to your point,
(29:40):
which is that there are some people who are just
more susceptible to hallucinations or visions or hearing things than others. Uh.
And so subsequently they found that those people within their
study were the ones who are really susceptible to getting
hit by this caffeine. The other explanation that's connected to
this seems to be tied to caffeine increasing stress, which
(30:02):
causes our bodies to release more cortisol. And and so
the explanation was that people who drink that much caffeine
are more prone to mental health associations because of this
amount of cortisol in their systems. They're stressed out to
begin with. Yeah, I mean when you start trying to
tease apart the way we perceive the world, which you know,
(30:23):
you can sort of get into the argument that that
all perception is essentially hallucination, and what we call an
hallucination is just an abnormal version or reskewed version of that.
You know, there's so many factors that determine that. So
you could have coffee having a direct role or an
indirect role on that manifestation. Maybe we need to do
like that's maybe that's our next Facebook Live is just you,
(30:43):
me and Joe drinking caffeine until one of us hallucination.
The viewers bet on exactly, So I see, you've got
something interesting here connected to the Church of Latter day Saints,
which we seem to be uncovering a lot of really
fascinating facts to them. Yeah, this is if you ever
rich uh you know, not a deep history, but you
(31:04):
still have reached a rich history there. And this is
something that I found when I looked in Oliver sacks
excellent book Hallucinations, which is always one of my go
toos anytime we we cover a topic that gets into
into hallucination. Now Sacks just passed away this year, right, Uh, yeah,
he recently did recently pass pass away. In this book,
he does not really discuss tea much at all, So
(31:27):
I wasn't able to pull out any wonderful nuggets of
caffeine and related hallucination. But I did find out a
wonderful t anecdote. Uh. He points out that obviously, members
of the Church of Latter day Saints substain from tea
and coffee. However, on the long march from the Mormon
Trail to Utah, the pioneers who had eventually found Salt
(31:49):
Lake City, happened upon a roadside herb which they brewed
into what is called has been called Mormon tea. Now,
the herb was actually nothing none other than if fed,
which contains ephedrin, which is chemically akin to amphetamines, and
hallucinations are sometimes an adverse side effect to ephedra. So
(32:11):
that's uh, how possible hallucination scenario they're from drinking tea.
And again, to come back to what we're talking about earlier,
anything essentially, unless you want to get really specific with
your with your with your definition of tea, any hot
water herbal concoction is a T. So there's cocoa tea,
there's there's opium T. You can you can brew a
(32:32):
tea with various psychedelic substances such as uh, mushrooms with psilocybin. Yeah, exactly.
These are all ways to get a t that uh
more or less is guaranteed to give you a an
altered state of consciousness, if not possible hallucinations. Another Facebook
live episode of us doing an ayahuasca ritual. We can
(32:55):
have the three cups. It would be like a ball
cup game, except the set of a ball under the
cup one of them is. I think we would quickly
figure out who got which one. But so you know,
let's review here for a second before I move on.
It seems like the verdict. Can green tea make you hallucinate?
Probably not. I mean, yes, there's enough caffeine in it
(33:17):
that if you drank a lot of it, it's possible.
But let's look back on the green tea story. The
idea there was that this guy was continually drinking green
tea over the course of his life. He was drinking
it every night before bed, and that that built up somehow,
I guess, in his blood stream, and that was what
(33:38):
was causing him to see the evil monkey. Uh, it
doesn't work like that, you know, it's a it's a
one one dose situation. I think in terms of that,
like you have to at the time be drinking at
least nine cups. Yeah, green tea is not They're not
deposits of green tea and a lifelong tea drinker's body
that are building up. Uh. You know, you kind of
(34:00):
get into this similar area where you have the idea
that that the drug use alcohol and drugs that they're
stored and you're fat and the only way to free
yourself from those is to to sign up for some
sort of like a sauna based program where you're gonna
sweat all that out of your your fat cells. It's like,
um reminding me of like sci fi scenarios to where
(34:21):
people take stuff and then it like their bodies like
an incubator for it, and then like they turn into
basically like a harvesting system for where people just shoved uh,
syringes in them and draw out, you know, green tea
out of their blood. All right, Well, on that note,
we're gonna take another quick break and when we come back,
we will explore the the the actual health benefits of
(34:41):
green tea and what some of the science says about it.
So if you're green tea drinker, especially, you're probably aware
of the commercial nature of it being healthy, at least
here in the United States. UM, it's heavily advertised as
(35:01):
being you know, great for you for a variety of reasons.
We're gonna go over this, Like I said, there's just
a ton of literature out there, but we're gonna go
over it kind of review what it does and what
it doesn't, at least in terms of direct evidence. So,
first of all, it is full of antioxidants, and as
such it's linked to health benefits like a lower risk
of stroke and some types of cancer. Uh. It's also
(35:24):
become very popular because people drink it wishing to prevent
cancer and health heart disease. But there are studies that
argue back and forth about these properties, and the experts
say there really isn't direct evidence yet to confirm anything
like a UM. And in fact, there is an interesting
(35:46):
uh right up about the health effects of green tea
in the Salem Press Encyclopedia. And the guy who wrote
that basically said, look, I only trust it if it's
a double blind, placebo controlled study. Uh. And you have
to do that. And he said the one that he
looked at that did prove something, although he wanted more evidence,
was that green team makes short term improvements in your
(36:08):
cholesterol profile, but those benefits disappear after four weeks. Now,
what wasn't clear to me was like, is it like,
you drink green tea one day, it helps you, and
then if you stop drinking green tea four weeks later,
those benefits go away. Or is it like, if you're
a continuous green tea drinker, you get a one time,
(36:28):
four week decrease in cholesterol and then it's just back.
I couldn't. I couldn't discern that from what he was saying.
But one way or the other, this was like the
one study. He was like, this one's for real, guys.
You know a lot of the health marketing around green
tea and just sort of like the the general idea
that green tea has healthy qualities that kind of floats
(36:51):
in the atmosphere around you. I have found myself being
influenced by that at times where I'll be in the
office and I think I should I'll be at home
I have green tea or should I have coffee? And
the little the voice of the I guess the monkey
will whisper in my ear and say, green days a
little healthier. Maybe not much, but maybe just a little.
Who knows. But you like green tea, so why don't
(37:13):
you just go ahead and drink it and you'll feel
like a little bit healthier. Yeah, yeah, man, I'm not
gonna stop thinking about that monkey for a while now.
If you follow us on social media, I posted an
original illustration somebody did of the monkey splashing around inside
a cup of green tea, and I asked people to
guess what we were doing the episode on and the
responses were hilarious. Uh, but yeah, monkey is going to
(37:36):
be our new mascot maybe. By the way, I also
asked the monkey. I said, if I drink the green
tea instead of the coffee, does that mean my teeth
won't become staying And the monkey said, no, there's still
dan it's in the car tea. Your teeth will still
get stained even though it's green and light. At least
he's uh, he's honest. Yeah, he's very truthful about it. Now,
(37:56):
we would have to ask the monkey about these cancer predictions,
because regarding cancer, it seems that green tea shows promise
for treating things like cervical display asia and reducing the
risk of prostate cancer. But again there's conflicting evidence about
whether it has any effect on stomach cancer for instance. Likewise,
researchers haven't found reliable evidence that it reduces breast cancer,
(38:19):
although there's some quote weak evidence that it decreases recurrence
of breast cancer, so maybe not preventing. But if you've
had breast cancer, you have to drink apparently at least
three or more cups a day in order to for
the recurrence to be staved off. Now, there's some other
disease treatments, and honestly, there were so many we might
(38:41):
miss some here, so please let it let us know
if there's something you know that we don't. But one
study looked, for instance, at how effective gargling green tea
is at preventing influenza UH. It showed that those who
did this were less likely developed influenza and less likely
to find friends to go have two with. UH. There's
also some preliminary evidence that it might help prevent colds
(39:04):
and the flu okay, UH weak evidence that chewing green
tea candy can reduce gum inflammation if you have ginger
vitis It's also been proposed as a means of preventing
liver disease, but the evidence isn't all that convincing. They're
now remember, like I said, it's got caffeine in it,
so of course it does affect our entire central nervous system.
(39:26):
This produces alertness. There's also a couple other substances that
are important to note here that are in green tea.
Theo bromine, which is a smooth muscle relaxant, and there's
also theophyline, which is a smooth muscle relaxant that specifically
can cause restricted air passages to open. So it's been
used to treat asthma and it makes breathing easier. So
(39:49):
again I have asthma, and I was like, hey, maybe
again another check in the column for Okay, I'll drink
more green now. Um so yeah. Another study on green
tea is that the polyphanols within it may help prevent
skin cancer if they're applied directly to the skin. So
I think, like you make like a polstice or something
(40:10):
that you put on your skin. This may help protect
the skin from sun damage, but not by physically blocking
ultraviolet light by protect but instead it protects your cells
from it. So it's it's not keeping the light from
hitting your skin, it's doing something to your cells that
prevent them from being damaged by the light. Well, there
seemed to be no shortage of of green tea and
(40:30):
few skin products. Oh yeah, I mean that's the thing is,
there's green tea and a lot of stuff right now.
I think I have shampoo with green tea in it. Yeah,
I'm sure. I'm pretty sure I've seen that as well.
Now I've there have also been studies that have found
associations between consuming green tea and reduced risk for several
different cancers. We've mentioned skin already, breast, long colon esophagal bladder. Uh,
(40:56):
there have been a lot of studies, and you know,
there seems to be in asociation there. Again, nobody's arguing
there is a magical property and green tea that is
just wiping out cancer cells left and right. But there
is this one amino acid in it called l theonine
that seems to be pretty powerful. Uh. And I I
(41:19):
went through an academic paper specifically on this it's properties
and green tea and what it's potentially doing in the brain.
So we'll cover this as well, this one is a
big nine comes up a lot with supplements. You can
go and get plenty of just either straight up or
alfonine and infuse supplements. Well, what's interesting about it is,
you know those other studies focused mainly on physical disease,
(41:42):
right cancer and UH disease treatments like influenza, but uh,
this amino acid relieves anxiety and calms us. But then
it also improves our alertness, So on top of the caffeine,
you're getting some alertness from this as well. It closely
res mbles the chemical glutamate, which signals excitation in our
(42:04):
brains as a neurotransmitter, so l phonine does the opposite
as of glutamate. It binds in the same receptors in
our brain as glutamate and therefore it blocks them from
receiving its effects. This inhibition is assisted by it also
stimulating the production of the neurotransmitter GABBA G A B A,
(42:27):
which also has common effects. So between those two or
three you know side effects. Apparently green tea calms you down. Yeah,
I mean those I feel like you have three or
four different supplement bottles. They're all present in readily available
and cheaper green tea. Uh. You know. The benefit here
is that unlike taking in anti anxiety drugs, green tea
(42:50):
and the l phonine within it produces the alertness instead
of sleepiness, so it doesn't impair your motor behavior. For instance.
So I don't know, if you're driving and you're stressed out,
but you don't want to fall asleep, drink some green tea. Additionally,
it seems to prevent the abrupt rise in blood pressure
that's associated with stress. And this is good because it
prevents arterial damage from the surging blood pressure in your body.
(43:12):
And that's not something I like to think about that.
I don't know. For some reason that that squixx me
out the idea of just like my blood pressure like
pushing so hard that it's like ripping my vessels apart.
That's what that would that would That's that's a horrifying image.
It seems unpleasant. There is also some evidence that it
influences how genes are expressed, specifically in the amygdala and
(43:34):
the hippocampus, and these, remember are the parts of the brain.
They're associated with fear aggression in memory, So it could
be used to treat stress, but also PTSD. There's some
people looking into green tea and how it might help
with that. This again we keep coming back to. This
reminds me of m D m A and the theory
surrounding that treating PTSD. So it's currently the subject of
(43:58):
human studies also with patients who have schizophrenia, so there's
some idea that it might be able to help them
as well. And get this, we know stress effects cognition,
but not only does l phonine reverse that kind of
impairment due to its relationship with glutamate, but it may
also be able to prevent damage to brain cells that
(44:20):
is induced from exposure to toxic levels of aluminum. So
like if you're breathing in an aluminum and it's like
potentially causing brain damage if you theoretically if you drink
green tea, it can prevent that damage from occurring. Uh.
It can also reduce the impact of having a stroke.
A stroke is where there's blockage of blood to our brain.
(44:44):
This results in the death of our brain cells. But
l phonine signals our endo field cells to constrict or
relax appropriately as our blood is flowing. So go back
to my my horrific imagery earlier. Your blood vessels are
basically accommodating for the rush of blood no matter what
it's I guess velocity. The velocity of blood is uh.
(45:07):
And specifically in animal studies, if you administer l PHI
and I up to twelve hours after an animal has
a stroke, it can protect their brain cells and reduce
the size of their damaged brain areas. So it seems
like it's pretty potent stuff. There's definitely something going on
here with green tea. Ah, it's okay, So we've we've
(45:30):
determined it's probably not gonna make you hallucinate unless you
binge drink it. And even then maybe UH and I
do not attempt to hallucinate just by bench drinking green tea.
We're not advocating if you're gonna get sick of green
tea before you see anything funny. Um. But then, like,
even though science hasn't really nailed down the research on this,
(45:55):
there seems to be a lot of good qualities to it. Yeah,
And like I said, you can pretty much look for
a green tea study about anything and you may very
well find it. For instance, I was looking around, there's
there's a study out there about the effect of green
tea on supplement absorption. Uh, there's a there's a particular
study two thousand fifteen looks at green tea is a
(46:16):
way to improve in our eyes. They received. Researchers in
this case successful use compounds from green tea to help uh,
image cancer tumors in mice. Also, I've seen it can
help fight glucoma. Really that the studies are all over
the place. We could do an entire podcast just on
you know, episode after episode of Green Teeth, every Green
(46:37):
Tea research that has come out. Yeah, but we're not
actually going to do that. Yeah, that's a that's another
show for another network. Um, all right, let's close out. Then.
Does it have health benefits? Seems so yeah. Will it
cause hallucination of evil monkey spirits? Doubtful? Probably not. But
let's remember that this is being pushed pretty hard commercially
(46:58):
right now, so much so that manufacturers are currently offering
the extracts and pillform right. We see these in like
a supplement stores and stuff like that. You could probably
even get them at the grocery store at this point.
Oh yeah, you can buy this stuff in Amazon, but
you should know and and this is where it circles
back again to those guys in the Victorian area throwing
(47:18):
iron filings and Prussian blue into their and cheap dounge
into their green tea. In a two thousand and six
analysis that tested green tea extract products, they found that
some of them were contaminated with lead. Uh and this
or something else about these specific extracts is potentially leading
(47:39):
to liver inflammation. So again, like everything in moderation, Yeah,
and it comes back to a theme that's it's come
up a lot recently. It came up on the second
Dangerous Food episode that Joe and I did, is that
green tea is a food product. You know where your
food products came from. The more the more access, the
(48:00):
more unrecognizable that food product is, the more I'm not
saying it's definitely bad, but the more questions there are
to potentially answer there. This is true. Every time I
eat a vegetarian meat loaf, I wonder what's actually in
this the meat of a vegetarian of course, if that's
another hard story, and you know this is something I'm
(48:23):
meant to bring up earlier. I feel like the green
tea short story that we started with the way that
it was inspired by this article in the Lancet. It
makes me think that had this been the nineteen seventies,
sixties or fifties, the Green Tea would have definitely been
a B movie or an exploitation, because that's where you
(48:43):
you often see these ideas and these new new studies
sometimes at least very weakly resonate for the first time, uh,
the first place that the sort of the media you know,
collective consciousness actually thinks about it for us. Second, I
for one, would really like to see like an exploitative
(49:05):
green tea horror movie. But despite that, let's let's learn
from my mistake, uh, and and know that you can
drink this stuff and it's gonna be okay, Like you're
not gonna start seeing evil monkeys anytime soon. Although uh please,
if anybody out there wants to send us our new
(49:26):
avatar of the Green Tea evil monkey, we we won't
discourage that. I would also love left to know does
anyone out there drink their green tea recordly out of
a hideous monkey mug? That would that would be perfect,
very nice. I kind of want one myself, all right,
So tell us about your monkey mugs or send us
your monkey images. Uh you canna get in touch with
(49:47):
us on all of our social platforms. We're on Facebook,
we're on Twitter, we're on tumbler, and we are on Instagram. Uh,
you can find all of those on stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where
we've got every episode of the podcast, every video that
we've ever done, and all of the various blog posts
(50:08):
that we have done as well that are connected to
the podcasts and other interests of ours. That's right, it's
a it's a new year. This is the first episode
of the New Year that we are recording. Do you
have any New Year's resolutions? Do you engage in that
sort of thing? I don't, but I gotta say, after
doing all the research on this, I will be drinking
more green tea. I feel like I probably will as well,
(50:31):
So I'll add that to my my other actual resolution,
which is too blind the mechanical eye of every automatic
toilet I encounter the entire year. Yeah, how are you
going to do that? You have like a like a
sewing needle. No, I mean it would be tempting to
go complete, you know, Odysseus on it and stab it
(50:51):
and stab the cyclopean eye out. I think I'm gonna
just gonna put stickers and duct tape over them, because
I think as responsible humans, we have the power. We
have the right to flush the toilet when and where
we want, when when we want to flush it, to
to judge the contents of the toilet, and and actually
push a button, not have the toilet go off at
(51:13):
odd times while we are potentially setting upon it. You're
referring specifically to our bathrooms here at work because they
are sensitive. They are sensitive to the point where it's
getting to where I cannot I cannot sit on a
toilet anywhere, and the smallest noise in the background will
make me think, oh goodness, is toilets about the plush?
I better hop up out of the sea because when
(51:34):
it flushes here too, the toilet splashed the ceiling. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
You're You're in for a hurricane of toilet water. It's
mechanical tyranny, and I'm not gonna take it anymore. Well,
let us know. There's one other way to let us
know if you want to support Robert in his fight
against the toilets, and that's by writing us at Blow
the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more
(52:05):
on this and thousands of other topics, is that how
stuff works. Dot com b
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