Skip to main content

Stress Less with This Kind of Tea


By Zap June 16, 2010, 08:05 ET

Next time you're feeling frazzled, cozy up to a nice warm cup of chamomile tea.

In a small study of people with anxiety, stress symptoms dropped by about 50 percent when German chamomile (Matricaria recutita) was taken daily for 8 weeks.

Calming Chamomile
In the study, people took anywhere from 220 to 1,100 milligrams of chamomile extract daily. But chamomile tea is another easy way to get a daily dose of this herbal remedy. Just steep 3 or 4 heaping tablespoons in hot water several times daily. And the nicest news of all? There were few side effects from chamomile in the small study; just one person experienced stomach upset. (Get answers to all your herbal-remedy concerns with this pageful of frequently asked questions.)

How Does It Work?
Researchers suspect that the flavonoids in chamomile could have something to do with the soothing effects. Or it could be that compounds in chamomile bind to the same receptors as antianxiety medications do. Chamomile may even affect the way certain brain chemicals act on nerves. Feeling stressed? Grab a cup of chamomile tea and double it up with one of these other soothers:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Olympic Diet of Michael Phelps!

By Kathleen M. Zelman, MPH, RD, LD WebMD Health News Questions and answers about the high-calorie diet that fuels the Olympic swimmer's championship performance. Aug. 13, 2008 -- His body may resemble the trim, athletic figure of Michelangelo's statue of David, but the diet of Michael Phelps sure doesn't sound like the stuff of champions. The U.S. Olympic swimmer told ESPN that he eats roughly 8,000-10,000 calories a day, including "lots of pizza and pasta." In addition to stuffing down carbs, he's said that he routinely eats foods like fried egg sandwiches. So exactly how do all those calories help fuel the most decorated Olympic athlete in history? Here are some questions and answers about the Michael Phelps diet. How can Michael Phelps eat 10,000 calories a day and still be so lean? There is no doubt he packs away a ton of food, but it is unlikely that he actually eats that many calories a day, an expert believes. University of Pittsburgh Director of Sports...
Post a Comment
Read more

Soy Products Can Reduce Sperm Counts!

By: Heather Hajek Published: Friday, 25 July 2008 www.healthnews.com C alling all men who want to become fathers! Soy products may reduce a man's sperm count. Based on a recent study, men who consume soy products may have lower sperm counts than those who don't. The study was based on a small group of men who visited the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center from 2000 to 2006. Even though the study found that some of the men who ate soy products on a regular basis had lower sperm counts, the researchers conducting the study are not saying that soy products were the cause of the lower sperm concentrations. The men who had soy products in their diets recorded lower sperm counts than those that didn't, but their counts were still within the normal range. Researchers don't deny that during the study men who consumed soy products had lower sperm counts, but they want people to realize there are other factors other than soy products that may have played a role in th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Biggest explosion!

Thu Feb 19, 3:58 pm ET WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US space agency's Fermi telescope has detected a massive explosion in space which scientists say is the biggest gamma-ray burst ever detected, a report published Thursday in Science Express said. The spectacular blast, which occurred in September in the Carina constellation, produced energies ranging from 3,000 to more than five billion times that of visible light, astrophysicists said. "Visible light has an energy range of between two and three electron volts and these were in the millions to billions of electron volts," astrophysicist Frank Reddy of US space agency NASA told AFP. "If you think about it in terms of energy, X-rays are more energetic because they penetrate matter. These things don't stop for anything -- they just bore through and that's why we can see them from enormous distances," Reddy said. A team led by Jochen Greiner of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics deter...
Post a Comment
Read more