Beverage Ideas: Making the Most of Green Tea and Coconut Milk

A few interesting beverage tidbits this week!

1. We know that green tea helps boost your metabolism, but when your body adjusts to the active ingredients, the boosting effect stops.

What can you do?

Try cycling your green tea intake. Drink it for two weeks and then stop for a week and start again. Or change the time of day when you drink it.

In general, for the metabolism boosting effect, drink two to four cups daily.

A study at Purdue University found that by adding citrus (lemon, lime, orange) to your green tea, thereby increasing the vitamin C levels of your beverage, absorption of green tea’s EGCG (which is what slims you down) increased by 56-75 percent.

2. We’re all aware that our ground water, and therefore our tap water, can be filled with harmful bacteria. How can you build up immunity to such bacteria?

One way you might not know about is by adding coconut milk or coconut oil to your diet.

Coconut is a rich source of lauric acid, which your body converts into monolaurin, a compound with the ability to kill illness-causing bacteria and viruses.

You can add coconut milk to a smoothie, spread coconut oil on bread, use it to replace butter in your baked goods, or use the oil to grill fish, chicken and vegetables. Choose unrefined coconut oil and whole (not light or fat-free) coconut milk. These varieties provide the benefits.

Also, if you’ve never opened up a young coconut and enjoyed real coconut water and eaten the fresh coconut meat, it’s one of my all time favorite treats!