Decaf Green Tea May Help Your Skin
Green tea, as you all may well know by now, is a great alternative to coffee in the morning. Green tea supplies an excellent stream of antioxidants, which is excellent for your skin. Not only your skin, but your overall body health is affected positively by green tea because it supplies a couple of key natural chemicals that help fight free radicals. Free radicals are responsible not only for cell damage around the body and degeneration of the tissues, but it is also responsible for skin damage.
If you’ve had acne for any length of time in your life, you know that it can damage your skin and cause scarring and trauma in it’s path of destruction. Antioxidants are an important part of your diet because they help to mend cell damage. Not only that, but there is even some evidence that when applied topically to the skin, green tea extract can help to calm inflammation, which means it probably helps with cell damage on the outside as well. Inflammation after all, is when the cells get “irritated”.
Acne is basically an inflammation of the skin, so any foods or drinks that are anti inflammatory in nature, like green tea or strawberries, blueberries, and other dark fruits or veggies, give you an anti inflammatory boost along with antioxidants, which work together to address cell damage.
If you’re worried about the caffeine in green tea, there are decaffeinated green teas you can buy. I found one that says it uses a special process to decaffeinate the tea to make sure the antioxidant value remains in place. You may want to read the label to make sure the process they use doesn’t interfere with the antioxidant content. Oh, and to squeeze every last benefit out of it, make sure you mix a little lemon or some other kind of fresh citrus juice with it. Lemon actually tastes great in tea.
There has been research that shows that when you drink it with a citrus juice, you absorb much more of the antioxidant value.
