| Researchers dip into bag of tea's health benefits
Can imbibing tea affect brain waves -- or perhaps more astonishingly, thwart the development of lung cancer?
A growing number of scientists, including a team on Long Island, theorize that tea is far more complex than most people might think. As a result, they are exploring new ways to uncover the chemical secrets nature has tucked into the leaves of green and black teas.
"People have been drinking tea for 5,000 years, and many cultures have used teas for medicinal purposes for just about that long," said John Foxe, a professor of neuroscience and biology at the Nathan Kline Institute in Orangeburg, N.Y. Foxe, who studies the effects of tea on the brain, presented data at a tea conference Tuesday at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington.
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On those iced tea orders, specify everything to a T
Now that a dining companion has taken to ordering iced tea "60-40" -- the desired ratio of sweet to unsweet -- and not been shot, I've decided there's no excuse for anything but clear communication between diner and server about tea. Not to mention everything else. So I appreciated a recent thread on a food Web site about missing modifiers -- words that servers should volunteer for clarity or that diners should ask further about, to be sure. People complained about ordering "tea" and not getting what they wanted. Some wanted plain and got fruit-flavored; some wanted sweet and got unsweet, some wanted hot and got cold (no, they weren't from around here). So whose responsibility is this? Everyone's, in an ideal world. But barring that, I'd break it down this way: • Diners should specify sweet or unsweet or hot when they expect basic and ubiquitous orange pekoe (which is a form of black tea: think Lipton).
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