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Green tea has long been extolled as a miracle herbal tea. Long drunken in the East in places such as China, India, Tibet and Japan, it is now soaring in popularity in the west.

As well as tasting great, it has many health properties that are proven in studies on long term green tea drinkers. Here are just some of the many benefits of green tea.

Green Tea As A Weight Loss Cure

This type of tea contains a mild stimulant but nowhere near the levels of caffeine as it’s cousins: regular tea and coffee. Combined with it’s other natural properties, drinking around 5 cups a day can help you lose weight as part of a weight loss program. This has been borne out in numerous studies on the link between green tea and metabolism.

Rich In Anti-Oxidants

Green tea is rich in antioxidants and polyphenols. These are well known to have cancer prevention and anti-aging properties. This is due to the nature in which it is manufactured compared to other types of tea where these compounds are destroyed. It also has a positive effect on your immune system and helps to fight off infections.

Aid To Digestion

This has a mild laxative effect but a positive effect overall on your digestion. Not only that but it also helps to reduce tooth decay!

Positive Effect On The Circulatory System

Perhaps the greatest benefits of green tea are the profound effects on the blood system. It has powerful blood thinning properties that can reduce the incidence of stroke and blood clots. It also lowers the level of bad cholesterol in the blood.

Green tea is best drunken in as natural a state as possible. You should look for the organic variety, preferably loose leaf rather than in a bag. Some of the best available is Japanese green tea although you may not have the tools and the patience to prepare it as they do.

Detox foot pads are allo the rage at the moment and there are many infomercials advertising their amazing properties available at a snip of a price. But are they real and can they really detoxify you or perhaps they are just a scam?

How Do Detox Foot Pads Work?

Also known as patches, these pads resemble tea bags and are composed of a mixture of different herbs which vary depending on which brand you get. Typically they might contain herbs, bamboo and even grapefruit!

The original Japanese detox foot pads were the first to hit the market and they have been used there for years before some entrepreneurs decided it would be a good idea to bring them to America and the rest of the world.

The idea is that you wear them on the feet and, as various accurpressure points are stimulated, the toxins flow out of your body and through the skin on the soles of your feet and into the foot pads.

In fact, you can observe them changing colour after wearing them overnight for a good recommended 8 hours. This is apparently a sign of the toxins having accumulated into the pads.

What Are The Benefits Of Detox Foot Pads?

So we have established that you can release toxins but what are the overall benefits then? A whole host of cured ailments have been described and the list is incredibly long. Some of the alleviated afflictions include: tiredness, lethargy, acne, stress, excess weight, coughs, colds, headaches, insomnia and more!

Real or Scam?

So do detox foot pads really work?

It is easy to criticise this invention because, on first inspection, it seems absurd to think that you can take toxins (including heavy metals) out of the body by simply wearing some plant extracts on the outside of your body.

There is an absence of clinical data out there on the efficiency of detox foot pads so we cannot look here for proof or evidence. What we can say however, is that they have been sold for decades in the Far East. Not only that, but some people swear by them.

This could be the placebo effect where someone takes a pill that contains nothing and believes it was a miracle cure, the power of the mind over the body.

Ultimately, these products are extremely cheap and you can lose nothing by purchasing a couple and seeing if they have any effect for you. The most popular and competitively priced ones are “Kinoki foot pads” that you will probably have seen advertised in several places already.

Chinese herbal medicine, also known as traditional chinese medicine or TCM, is a very wide ranging tradition of experimentation and research tha date back several thousand years. On of the earliest sources is a tribal chief by the name of Shen Nong who would use his own body to record the effects and benefits of various herbs. They can be used for a variety of ailments both mild and severe including allergies, viruses, organ diseases and even cancer and HIV.

Chinese herbal medicine is part of an entire East Asian ethos of Chi energy, Ying and Yang, harmony and other similar themes. Whilst it has some shamanastic origins, the fact remains that it does work even though modern western education cannot always explain it.

As well as Chinese herbal medicine, these traditions also encompass accupuncture, massage, breathing techniques and Tai Chi. Whilst some may scoff at this type of medicine, the fact remains that it has evolved over 4,000 years whereas drug companies have only been making modern medicines for around 100 years.

Drawing from over 5,000 plant, mineral and animal substances, the usual method of ingestion for this type of medicine is in the form of brewing of a tea from the raw material.

If you are thinking about using this type of alternative medicine to supplement or replace your existing drug regimes, seek out a well qualified and educated expert as combining the two methodologies can in rare cases cause adverse complications.