Synergies Between Caffeine and L-Theanine
Everybody knows the feeling. Thirty minutes after drinking a coffee you’re ready to climb Mount Everest, but you can’t seem to stop shaking. Another two hours pass and you're ready for bed.
Possibly the biggest downside of coffee is the dreaded jitters and the following crash. Many people deal with the crash by drinking another coffee or energy drink...then another...and another. #Lezbehonest you’re probably on coffee number two or three right now. It’s a perpetual cycle.
Almost immediately after launching Zest Tea we started getting feedback from customers about feeling wide awake and alert after drinking our caffeinated tea blends. That was to be expected, but many customers also commented on not feeling ‘jittery’ and not ‘crashing’ a few hours later.
For thousands of years, tea drinkers have been talking about this so-called ‘calm energy’. At first we didn’t market the effect, because we weren’t sure the average consumer would notice. It quickly became apparent we had underestimated the market (or the product). Even prominent tea bloggers like Sororitea Sisters started talking about this unexpected side effect (or lack there of) of Zest.
Philly.com might have put it best:
“We felt ‘in the zone’ almost more clearheaded than we would normally be with coffee by our side.
Staff writer Nick Vadala admitted to drinking at least 8-9 cups of coffee on a daily basis. With Zest, he cut down to 3-4 cups of tea, which proved to him that it matched, if not exceeded, the caffeine content in a cup of coffee. “It definitely hits you harder, but I didn't get jittery or anything,”
So... Where did the jitters and crash go?
It ends up teas contain a rare amino acid called L-Theanine, which has a synergistic relationship with caffeine and actually helps to moderate caffeine's effects. In normal teas, one might write this off as resulting from the lack of caffeine, but with Zest, which has as much caffeine as coffee, or about three times the levels of traditional teas, it’s extremely apparent.
Although these effects have been spoken about in tea lore for thousands of years, it wasn’t until recently that academic and government groups began conducting hard studies on the synergistic relationship of L-Theanine and caffeine. One such study, published in The Journal of Nutrition found that the combination of the two substances significantly improved cognitive functions. Most importantly, these effects were not present when the subjects consumed caffeine or L-Theanine separately. There are now a multitude of studies confirming this effect.
So there you have it. Thousands of years of crazy tea lore confirmed by modern science. Pretty cool if you ask me.
If you’re interested in testing the effect for yourself you can buy Zest Tea Energy Blends at ZestTea.com.
https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/138/8/1572S/4750819