L-Theanine: a 4,000 Year Old Mind-Hack
worldoftea.org
worldoftea.org
(Not that it's a bad thing per se, of course.)
It has benefits and does work to enhance the benefits of caffeine. That said, this article over-hypes it, and it's really not that big of an impact.
Drinking tea is good for you, we've known this for years. Keep drinking it.
That's all I need to hear. I've been drinking tea since I was 4, and I'm not about to stop now.
I guess "you should" is the wrong language. Perhaps supplant with "it would be incredibly inconvenient but way cool if you were to"
I think their retail model is actually really interesting, and their blog is very transparent about the realities of the business: http://www.tearetailer.com/
Edit: Most of the places in the child comments are great too. I'd personally try to avoid Teavana, though. From my experience, they take low grade teas and sell them for a much higher price for the masses. I've also seen paint come off of some teaware there with little effort.
Its hard to explain rationally without sounding like a hipster, but I think I just got spoiled by the really cool tea shop I used to go to at school - it was like the kind of place you would find an ancient artifact of untold power in the corner behind a dusty basket of chocolate bars.
Not that that's the only kind of tea shop I would go to, but it really felt like a place owned by people who got it: they stayed open past their posted hours and when you walked in, whoever was working (there was a grand total of 4 people that worked there over the five years I went) would acknowledge you casually and never talk about product unless it really seemed like you wanted to.
I guess now I have to try it...
Remember: their most common customer is "random person walking down Madison street in Forest Park".
I, a random person, was walking down Madison one day when I found the Todd and Holland store. Bill Todd spent over an hour introducing me to some white teas that were new to me, including providing taste tests. He was extraordinarily nice and I found a new favorite white while I was there. I can find tea I like cheaper online, but I am happy to pay a small premium on occasion just for his expertise. I sold my home in Oak Park, so I don't get in there as often as I would like anymore - but I can definitely recommend them as a great local merchant that knows their stuff. Unlike the mall shops where the staff tend to know little to nothing about tea.
I've purchased some decent Silver Needle at Coffee and Tea Exchange in Lakeview - but the prices are a little high.
PS: I drink probably 3 cups a day. I am still not a genius and I get sleepy by mid-day.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theanine
Rather, its primary effect seems to increase the overall
level of the brain inhibitory transmitter GABA.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-Aminobutyric_acid#Pharmac...
Drugs that act as agonists of GABA receptors or increase
the available amount of GABA typically have relaxing,
anti-anxiety and anti-convulsive effects.,. Many
of the substances below are known to cause anterograde
amnesia and retrograde amnesia.
Followed by a list of substances that increase GABA levels
Caffeine, I guess, will counter some of these effects, but still it makes me worried to play with brain chemistry. Particularly with supplements.
Edit: To one who downvoted, could you tell me what you found objectionable ?
Also, tea is more of a cultural phenomenon in that region of the world. It's not thought of as a tool for meditation. In fact, in yogic traditions, you're supposed to stay away from caffeine.
"Medicinal plants contain a wide array of chemical compounds. At first, this looks like chaos, but more investigation reveals a distinct order. Natural selection pressures push a plant to "try out" variations on molecules to enhance the plant's odds of surviving stressful environments. So, often, one molecule is present in the greatest amount and has the most dramatic effect in a human body -- but along with it are variations of that molecule in the same plant.
For example, for several years, I did ethnobotanical study in South America, researching native uses for coca leaf, which most of us know only as the source of the isolated, problematic, addictive drug cocaine. For Andean Indians, whole coca leaf is the number one medicinal plant. They use it to treat gastrointestinal disturbances; specifically, for both diarrhea and constipation. From the perspective of Western pharmacology, this makes no sense. Cocaine stimulates the gut, it increases bowel activity, so obviously it would be a good treatment for constipation, but what could it do for diarrhea except make it worse?
However, if you look carefully at the coca leaf's molecular array, you find 14 bioactive alkaloids, with cocaine in the greatest amount. While cocaine acts as a gut stimulant, other coca alkaloids can have precisely the opposite action, they inhibit gut activity.
This means that when you take the whole mixture into the body, the potential is there for the action to go in either direction. What decides it? The state of the body, which is a function of which receptors in the gut's tissues are available for binding. During my time in Andean Indian communities, I collected many reports about whole coca's paradoxical, normalizing effect on bowel function, and experienced it firsthand, as well."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/why-plants-are-...
He speculates about a lot of stuff like this that sounds pretty crazy unless you're willing to take the time to understand his argument. Obviously these kinds of musings are unproven, but that is by definition the nature of speculation. And his actual medical advice is all pretty solid from what I've seen. My favorite talk by him is this:
http://www.matrixmasters.net/salon/?p=129
Again there is a lot of speculation, but there's nothing wrong with that at least in my book.
Perhaps, but that's probably why the GP talked about his reputation "in medical circles". He's not any more knowledgeable about science than his major critics:
http://www.quackwatch.com/11Ind/weil.html
http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2008/06/science_is_irrelev...
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=4431
http://scientopia.org/blogs/whitecoatunderground/2009/10/18/...
"The leaders of the establishment believe in the scientific method, and in the rule of evidence, and in the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology upon which the modern view of nature is based. Alternative practitioners either do not seem to care about science or explicitly reject its premises."
Not only is this intellectually dishonest because it has nothing to do with what Weil has actually written, but it isn't even true; it was homeopathy that invented evidence-based medicine and drug testing in the first place.
I'll need a citation for that. Homeopathy is one of the most blatantly nonsensical, improbable, and unproven "disciplines" I've ever come across.
Edit: For context: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy
"19th-century homeopaths pioneered systematic drug-testing research, challenged the dangerously depleting procedures of mainstream physicians at that time, established rigorous professional standards, and valued advanced education at least as highly as their mainstream counterparts did. It was not without reason that homeopaths considered the bases of their approach to medical problems to be more logical and more promising than the inherited tradition of the ancients, upon which mainstream physicians still based their practices."
(For what it's worth, JAMA highly recommends the book.)
> The author seems to have a complete inability to just point out any errors Weil has made
Are we reading the same thing? The quote you cited was from the fifth paragraph of the 18-paragraph first section of a five-section piece which contains countless references to Weil's own words. Admittedly I have not read the whole thing yet myself, but I would hope you could reserve judgment on the intellectual honesty of the essay after reading somewhat past the introductory portion.
"Weil's writings are ambiguous about the conflict between science and alternative medicine, as they are about many other issues in alternative medicine."
What conflict between science and alternative medicine? How is his writing ambiguous? How is this a problem? How is his writing ambiguous about other issues in alternative medicine?
"[weil] thinks that all healing methods ought to be tested; and yes, modern science can make useful contributions to our understanding of health and disease. Yet the scientific method is not, for Weil, the only way, or even the best way, to learn about nature and the human body."
What does Weil actually get wrong? Is there actually some error in either his epistemology or what he is advocating?
"Many important truths are intuitively evident and do not need scientific support, even when they seem to contradict logic."
Where does he actually say this? What's the context? There isn't even any inherent problem with this statement, so it doesn't make any sense to criticize him for it unless you're going to actually go out and find something wrong.
"Weil is not bothered by logical contradictions in his argument, or encumbered by a need to search for objective evidence."
What logical contradictions?
The typical Redditor could write exactly the same article without even reading any of Weil's books. And it really only gets worse from there, e.g.
"According to Weil, many of his basic insights about the causes of disease and the nature of healing come from what he calls 'stoned thinking'"
Again he can't find any actual problem with what Weil is saying, so he's just poisoning the well.
He does eventually make a couple of points that appear to be solid, but there is so much other crap in there that it's hard to take seriously. If there are cases where Weil is wrong then by all means he should be called out on it, but this article is just nonsense.
As for your strawman about yogic monks: the article did not say "all monks..", just "monks...". The difference here is that without the qualifier, english assumes the statement refers to a significant portion, but not all or even most. Further, some traditions, such as various forms of Buddhism, particularly those that practice sitting meditation, do in fact have tea as part of the meditative ritual.
tl;dr - you are way over-simplifying and being generally disingenuous
For me, it doesn't work. I'm just too wired, my heart feels like it's going to pop out of my chest if I take an amount that will affect my actual concentration (not the same as alertness). Adderall, to me, feels like a much smoother caffeine, and I can concentrate. However, I hate the way it also makes me feel in high doses. Atomoxetine worked great for me as well, but had weird "sexual" side effects. Right now I'm mostly on Wellbutrin XL, which is a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor, and while it doesn't work as well stimulants, it does work to a point and I feel like my normal self and even better. So far, the best combination for me has been Wellbutrin with a small kicker (5-10mg) of Adderall. Before Wellbutrin, I would take 20-60mg of Adderall a day. Also, Wellbutrin helps with some of my natural anxiety as well.
Also, for what it's worth, Adderall (a stimulant) tends to decrease anxiety for me in certain situations, while amplifying it in others. It's a weird relationship. In some social situations where tons of things are happening, without Adderall I can't focus on anything and I start to go on a weird panic mode. With adderall, that decreases because I can ignore certain things. But it also decreases with alcohol too, because I just don't care.
Anyways, the best thing I ever did was see a psychiatrist. Treatment of ADHD sucks because it's hard to know what will and what won't work, and what side effects are involved.
end tangent.
My "straw-man" was not meant to be anything as such. It was an example of a different meditation tradition where tea/coffee is to be avoided.
I used to never drink coffee or tea; when I really needed to "wake up" I'd have an espresso and I'd be good for 10-12 hours.
Then I had a kid and found myself needing it daily. After a few months of daily coffee I started to realize that I was exhausted until I drank some coffee; then I wasn't so tired but still couldn't concentrate very well.
Having read a similar article a few weeks ago I switched to tea instead of coffee and I must say I've felt much more productive on tea as well as slightly less exhausted before I drink it.
Would love to hear of others' anecdotal evidence.
For starters, with coffee there is the one-two punch that you get a sugar rush and then later on the caffeine kicks in. (I've read somewhere that caffeine takes about 6 hours to kick in, so if you're perking up straight away it is perhaps not the caffeine per se)
If you don't take sugar and it is the caffeine kicking in, it may be doing so in a particularly horrible and insidious way, that it is (mildly) addictive, and the perking up is simply the absence of the withdrawal symptoms (that old story about banging your head on a brick wall - it feels so good when you stop).
Anecdotally, something I found really interesting is that I play much better chess when I'm off caffeine than when I'm on.
Oh sure, on caffeine you feel all perky and smart and as if your brain is running ten times faster (or whatever), but I think what is actually happening is that we just get bored faster. On caffeine I might only think one or two moves ahead and then pick the moves that my intuition tells me. But off caffeine I can actually 'slow down' enough to play noticeably better, I can think an extra couple of moves ahead over and above the "do something now!!!" mode that caffeine puts me in.
If this is right, then caffeine makes me stupider, because I rush in, and can't sit still to do the deep thinking that really high quality thought and software design require.
If you ever get bulk l-theanine powder (it's quite cheap), you'll recognize the taste. It's particularly prominent in sencha, gyokuro, and other Japanese green teas - that savory/salty/MSGish taste.
Anecdotally, l-theanine negates most of the jitteriness from caffeine for me. Coffee, pop, etc. make me edgy in a way that tea doesn't.
What tea should we be drinking? :)
If you like scotch, try lapsang souchoug - it's a smoked Chinese black tea.
If you like sushi, try Japanese sencha or gyokuro - the same umami flavors in nori and kombu come through in the tea.
Etc. Etc.
If you were me, I would suggest a "malty" Assam (or an Irish breakfast blend) for most mornings, lapsang souchong for cold winter weekends, bundled up with crossword puzzles or programming texts, cheap-but-decent Assam as a base for making masala chai (with fresh cardamom and vanilla sugar), and good Sencha for the office. Citrusy green teas are great for summer pitchers of iced tea.
A good tea shop will be able to find matches for what you like, though. (Also, somebody at Tea Gschwendner (in Chicago) taught me that, after smelling lots of interesting teas, the best way to reset your sense of smell is to smell your clothes. FWIW.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sencha
only chart I could find: http://www.o-cha.com/green-tea-benefits.htm
I'm able to buy loose leaf in bulk from a local store so I can't recommend a particular online retailer. In person I would go by smell rather than brand, the aroma of good sencha is very distinct.
Those medical studies are usually discarding the parallel social relation of drinking tea. Tea drinkers may have different habits than the coffee drinkers. This is similar than the "the children who have grown with books at home have better education", the reason is not really the books by them-self but more just a sign of the social behaviour. Might be the case of (some) tea drinkers.
http://russell.ballestrini.net/response-to-l-theanine-a-4000...
That said, I've had consistently good experiences with Adagio, and (once you know what you like) tea is well-suited to mail order.