Last Updated on June 21, 2018 by Patricia Carter
SUMMARY: Plenty of studies find anti-inflammatory effects of dietary antioxidants such as green tea for chronic disease. Even in IBD patients, who have a very messed up microbiome (a finding of the American Gut data), the benefits of antioxidant therapy is well documented (see below studies). Read here about a simple EASY N=1 hack for one IBD patient that shut down a mild psoriasis skin flare that began two years ago. They flared psoriasis, but not the autoimmune IBD, eating strict healing diet Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD) probably due to a gluten/sugar airborne exposure. The hack that worked for stopping psoriasis: Green Tea, Black Tea with Lemon Juice antioxidant blend! I share their recipe here! It is simple enough that you may want to add it to your immune calming anti-inflammatory arsenal too! Make sure to see below for why it is important to NOT drink Green Tea for antioxidant benefit along with Iron.
If the tea and lemon juice blend posted here isn’t your cup of tea, try extending the concept and increase other antioxidants. For ideas, see below for the Phytonutrients from Dana Farber Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center PDF. Also see below for the vegetables and fruits Dr. Terry Wahls recommends for her MS diet now in clinical trial. That diet is also for autoimmunes like RA, Lupus, IBD, psoriasis, and neurological such as Parkinson’s, early memory loss/dementia, depression, anxiety, even PTSD (fighter pilots with narcolepsy), traumatic brain injury, as well as diabetes and obesity (to normalize blood sugars), and heart disease atherosclerosis — which is now being looked at as possible autoimmune since it is a gut and inflammation issue (see the whole TMAO issue here).
That something as simple as drinking a blend of green and black tea with lemons in addition to your healing diet (be it Mediterranean, PALEO, SCD, GAPS, AIP, WAHLS…) can defy autoimmune psoriasis is amazing. You can even add it to smoothies (see here) or try this Power Sports Drink Smoothie — even for kids)!
The RECIPE: Defy Autoimmune Psoriasis: Green Tea, Black Tea, Lemon Juice Blend
Green Tea, Black Tea, Lemon Juice Iced Tea Blend
Source: https://biomeonboardawareness.com/
Notes
This IBD patient drinks most days 16 oz (2 cups) but admits to missing or drinking only one cup on some days.
The brand teas they use are: 365 Organic Black Tea and Eden Organic Sencha Green Tea, both from Whole Foods.
Note: If drinking green tea for antioxidant benefit, DO NOT drink green tea along with iron (like leafy greens kale/spinach, red meat, or supplements containing iron). IBD patients really shouldn't be taking supplements containing iron as they are really hard on the gut, but others using green tea for antioxidant benefit may be. For this finding, see the study: Combining Green Tea and Iron Does Not Help IBD Patients,.
For links to the studies finding green tea benefit for autoimmune IBD see the post publishing this recipe..
Ingredients
- 9 bags of organic black tea
- 6 bags of organic green tea
- 4 lemons, juiced
Instructions
- Fill up a 3 qt pot nearly to the top with filtered water.
- Bring water to just below a boil. You want lots of bubbles on the bottom.
- Move the pot off the heat.
- Add 9 black tea bags and 6 green tea bags; steep for 15 min.
- In the meantime, fill two 1/2 gallon pitchers half way up with ice.
- Juice 4 lemons. Divide juice into the 2 glass pitchers.
- When tea is done steeping, remove tea bags and allow them to cool a bit.
- In the meantime, divide the brewed tea into the glass pitchers. Be careful. The tea is very hot. I just use a 2 cup glass measuring cup so that I can pour into the tiny openings of the pitchers I use.
- By the time I'm done this, tea bags are cool enough to squeeze tea from. Divide that too among the pitchers.
- Place a lid on the tea and refrigerate.
IMPORTANT: DO NOT Drink Green Tea along with Iron
Combining Green Tea and Iron Does Not Help IBD Patients or anyone else drinking it to calm the immune system for that matter! The article explains that if drinking green tea for antioxidant benefit, DO NOT drink it along with iron (like leafy greens kale/spinach, red meat, or supplements containing iron). NOTE: IBD really shouldn’t be taking supplements containing iron as they are really hard on the gut but others using green for antioxidant benefit may be.
EGCG, the primary compound in green tea, inhibits myeloperoxidase, a pro-inflammatory enzyme, which is released by white blood cells during inflammation. “If you drink green tea after an iron-rich meal (red meat, spinach, kale), the main compound in the tea will bind to the iron and the green tea loses its potential as an antioxidant. In order to get the benefits of green tea, it may be best to not consume it with iron-rich foods.
Why this IBD patient may be right in thinking airborne gluten and sugar originated the psoriasis flare.
There is a psoriasis and celiac disease (CD) connection!
What is totally cool was that their IBD did not flare even though they recalled tasting flour and sugar from on their lips and had thin films of flour layered on kitchen tools throughout the cooking area. They thought their gut microbiome was resilient enough eating strict SCD for over 5 years that it would not flare the IBD. While their SCD enhanced microbiome protected them from an autoimmune IBD flare, it did not protect them from flare of their autoimmune psoriasis. Hello gluten and psoriasis link!?! But there also is a gluten and IBD link. Amazing microbiome beasties at play for sure protecting this host immune system from over reacting despite dangling stimulating exposure triggers for autoimmune IBD. That’s a win for SCD! See a discussion on the SCD microbiome given Dr. Oz’s three day cleanse here.The “expanded” SCD foods this IBD patient re-introduced and why.
- They added in a few foods that are in line with the UMass IBD-AID (anti-inflammatory diet) guidelines. Foods added were cocoa, sweet potatoes, oats, and maple syrup although they aren’t eating those with abandon. They also now eat a few things that are not within SCD or UMass IBD-AID guidelines such as properly prepared quinoa, green plantains, green bananas, and cooked/cooled white potatoes (and albeit a very few potato chips here and there, sigh).
- Excluding those chips, the foods re-introduced mostly have the specific purpose of expanding foods having substrate that is especially helpful for increasing microbiome diversity and abundance through fermentation in the colon. Hello increased butyrate.
- Influencing their expanded diet was the insights of an x-NFL player that had IBD. He ate strict SCD for about 3 years. Imagine eating a few loaves of SCD Banana Nut Bread each day to keep calorie loads in season! He has successfully expanded his diet, though he still is gluten-free and lactose containing dairy-free. Potatoes actually took the longest time for him to tolerate.
- So dietary hacks for the psoriasis flare beginning in 2016 likely interacted with an immune system that had somewhat improved functionality. But that’s only purely my guess.
- We have no way of knowing tolerance or inflammation from these food additions because they don’t have a GI doc, sigh, that tests systematically inflammatory markers (blood H&H, albumin, SED, and CRP) along with fecal calprotectin for food additions beyond SCD. A patient of Dr. David Suskind explained to me that this is the strategy Dr. David Suskind uses although he prefers his IBD patients remain strict SCD.
- UMass IBD-AID is amazing and a clinical trial looking at microbiome pre and post this diet is currently underway at UMass for IBD. The initial pilot study results for the UMass study showed success for 24 IBD patients eating a whole foods diet which follows the guidelines of a slightly modified SCD diet — see here for Table 2, UMass IBD-AID Food Phase Chart. Conclusion. UMass has even begun teaching the IBD-AID evidence based diet cooking class. You can read more about the UMass IBD-AID diet in this post — it is the SECOND STUDY listed under the lightbulb or “IBD Studies” section.
The studies: IBD, Green Tea and Other Antioxidants.
- Green Tea Polyphenols and Sulfasalazine have Parallel Anti-Inflammatory Properties in Colitis Models. June 2013
- Bioactivity of Polyphenols: Preventive and Adjuvant Strategies toward Reducing Inflammatory Bowel Diseases-Promises, Perspectives, and Pitfalls. July 2016
- Flavonoids in Inflammatory Bowel Disease: A Review. April 2016
- Advances in nutritional therapy in inflammatory bowel diseases: Review. Jan 2016
- Antioxidant therapy for treatment of inflammatory bowel disease: Does it work? Dec 2015
Antioxidants in other healing diets: Cancer and WAHLS (for MS, other autoimmunes, and neurological conditions).
CANCER
Phytonutrients from Dana Farber Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center pdf (note two servings of cruciferous vegetables for detox at the bottom of the slide) is:
Wahls insights on green tea: She recommends in addition to drinking it, to coat grassfed beef in green tea to allow the phytonutrients and all of the great antioxidants in tea to seep into the meat and tenderize it nicely. To do so, she simply coats pork, beef, or bison roast with 2 to 3 tablespoons of loose green tea (or 3 to 4 bags of green tea). It is then roasted at low temperature, preferably at 180 to 225 degrees. Last, keep the meat medium rare.
A recent status update of Dr. Wahls research can be heard on Robb Wolf, Episode 252 – Dr. Terry Wahls – Multiple Sclerosis and Autoimmunity, Dec 14, 2014. Dr Wahls explained that her diet, “The Wahl’s Protocol, Food As Medicine
WAHLS explained in this podcast that her protocol recommends eating 9 cups vegetables/fruits each day for for men and tall women (like 6′) and if a petite women, then 4 to 6 cups each day. The goal is to eat high quality protein and lots of protein. Wahls suggests in order to eat 9 cups of vegetables/fruits a day, to eat 4 cups of whole but to juice the remaining. She says to not over stuff yourself. When asked if you can substitute for some vegetables, some low calorie sprouted lentils, her reply did not really answer the question. Wahl’s Protocol can be tweaked to be a more ketogenic diet but reduces protein from the classic high PALEO type diet, to add in vegetables.
Another Pearl of the podcast is that Wahls Protocol helps: toxic overload, nutrient insufficiency, leaky gut, antibiotic leading to leaky gut, insufficient Vitamin D3 and K2 levels, food sensitivity, autoimmunity… and these are at root of all autoimmune and degenerative problem. She says there are only so many ways disease can occur. To consider focusing on the Functional Medicine chapter of her book so as to target the root cause of the illness and put your first efforts there. Disease conditions are not snowflake. Remove grains, legumes, and dairy which are common gut inflammatories.
In conclusion,
Want to help calm a reactive immune system? Consider increasing antioxidant foods such as green tea, or those of the Dana-Farber Cancer Center, or add in the tenets of Wahls Protocol. What do you have to lose?
Let us know in the comments your hack successes.
If you try this Green tea, Black Tea, and Lemon Juice Blend antioxidant hack, let us know your findings too!
[Jin-Jing Jia et al 2017] Diabetes Mellitus and Alzheimer’s Disease: The Protection of Epigallocatechin-3-gallate in Streptozotocin Injection-Induced Models, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5702501/
The chemical structure of EGCG is illustrated in Figure Figure11. EGCG is a complex molecule formed by a flavanol core structure with a gallocatechol group and a gallate ester (Botten et al., 2015). These two gallocatechol rings confer the potent antioxidant and chelating properties to EGCG (Braicu et al., 2013). Each of the gallocatechol rings is able to directly capture reactive oxygen species from the environment with high efficiency (Nanjo et al., 1996). The pyrogallol group provides EGCG with strong metal-chelating ability, which allows it to bind transition metal ions acting as an antioxidant (Zhang et al., 2000). The galloyl group has also been associated with inhibitory effects on the microsomal enzyme system (Chen and Zhang, 2007) as well as with lipid lowering action (Kim et al., 2014). In the last two decades, scientists paid attention to the protection of EGCG on diabetes and AD due to its robust antioxidant property.
EGCG has protective role in diabetes and AD, but the investigations are actually limited and restricted to antioxidant field. In my submission, it should be well performed to study the effect of EGCG treatment on glucose metabolism and insulin signaling, as well as the corresponding mechanisms, which may contribute to easily understand the pathogeny of diabetes and AD and the protective role, and promote its clinical application.
Antioxidant and disease Power Point for: Tea, Chocolate and Coffee at: http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/health/rschnoll/contact/documents/hightea.pdf by: Roseanne Schnoll, PhD, RD, CDN Dept Health and Nutrition Sciences
40 Foods with Superpowers, http://www.menshealth.com/nutrition/foods-with-superpowers?page=1
Susan Bowerman, assistant director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Tea/Green Tea – Immunity Booster
Studies show that green tea—infused with the antioxidant EGCG—reduces the risk of most types of cancer. “The phytonutrients in tea also support the growth of intestinal bacteria,” says Bowerman. “Specifically, they inhibit the growth of bad bacteria—E. coli, Clostridium, Salmonella—and leave the beneficial bacteria untouched.” Why is this important? “Because up to 70 percent of your immune system is located in your digestive tract,” says Bowerman. “Four cups a day will keep it functioning at its peak.”