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Cure-All for Modern Life: Green Tea!

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Tea is harvested by real people like this woman, so choose organic, fair-trade leaves when you’re at the store. 

While I’m practically allergic to the caffeine in coffee (though I so love the taste), some days I couldn’t get by without a little green or white tea to perk me up. As we’ve all heard ad nauseum fo the past few years, antioxidants, which are found in high levels in green tea, chocolate, pomegranates, blueberries and other foods are cancer fighters ’cause they attack free radicals (which are plentiful in our polluted air and water, even if you live in the middle of nowhere).

But you don’t want to drink just any tea, especially not one made with tea leaves that are of dubious quality (which don’t taste great) or Some great green teas to get you started include:

Srina Green Tea is delicious, with clean, earthy taste and a tidy brew. I got sent some as a sample a few months back and it perks me right up. Their farming eco-credentials are impressive:

Srina™ (pronounced, shrih-nah) is 100% organically grown green tea, hand-plucked and packaged using natural fibers. We grow our green tea on a distinctly high mountainous region of Sri Lanka located on a 90-acre rainforest called Paradise Farm.

Yogi Teas makes most of my favorite teas. All of them are mostly organic, and they have a huge variety of green teas (including non-caffeinated and chai). The teas have their origins in the 1970’s, when followers of Yogi Bhajan, served it in vegetarian restaurants and expanded from there.

Choice Organics green teas are all-organic, harvested sustainably from China, India, Japan and Nepal. They also have a huge selection of green teas; try a couple and figure out which ones are your favorites!

Starre Vartan is founder and editor-in-chief of Eco-Chick.com and the author of the Eco-Chick Guide to Life. She's also a freelance science and environment writer who has published in National Geographic, CNN, Scientific American, Mental Floss, Pacific Standard, the NRDC, and many more. She lives on an island in Puget Sound with her partner and black cat. She was a geologist in her first career, and still picks up rocks wherever she goes.