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L-Theanine: What's The Tea?
Plus: the better way to keep your brain young
The 10almonds Team
June 05, 2023
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
Loading Screen Tip: if you can, maintain your balance while standing on one leg and then the other (to level-up, you can do this while performing other tasks—this writer does it a lot at her standing desk while writing, for instance).
You can start by just lifting one foot a little off the ground, but ideally, you’ll rest the raised foot on your other thigh, or do a quad stretch, or practise the yoga “tree” position, things like that.
This is really good not only because balance now can mean not getting a broken hip later, but also, training balance improves the connections between the two halves of our brain—which has many other benefits, beyond the scope of this quick tip!
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
L-theanine, an amino acid found in tea, has many health benefits, including:
Increases focus and cognitive performance
Reduces stress/anxiety
Supports healthy weight management
Reduces inflammation
Supports immune health
Helps fight cancer
May extend lifespan
Of all the cognitive activities we can do to keep our brains young, keeping our language skills polished is one of the most critical (use it or lose it!)
Today’s sponsor Memrise offers an easy, fun, and useful (because as a bonus, you learn another language) way to do just that!
Read on to learn about these things and more…
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
Water Flossing vs String Flossing: Which is Better?
Maintaining a good dental hygiene is very important for our overall health. In this video we learn about water flossing and string flossing, along with other tools that to ensure good dental hygiene—and all the other parts of our health that depend on that!
🍵 MAIN FEATURE
L-Theanine: What’s The Tea?
We’ve touched previously on l-theanine, when this newsletter was new, and we had only a few hundred subscribers and the carefully organized format wasn’t yet what it is today.
So now it’s time to give this potent dietary compound / nutritional supplement the “Monday Research Review” treatment…
What is it?
L-theanine is an amino acid found in tea. The human body can’t produce it, and/but it’s not essential for humans. It does have a lot of benefits, though. See for example:
How does it work?
L-theanine works by moderating and modulating the brain’s neurotransmitters.
This sounds fancy, but basically it means: it doesn’t actually add anything in the manner of a drug, but it changes how we use what we have naturally.
What does it do? Read on…
It increases mental focus
It has been believed that l-theanine requires the presence of caffeine to achieve this (i.e., it’s a combination-only effect). For example:
But as it turns out, when a group of researchers actually checked… This isn’t true, as Foxe et al. write:
❝We asked whether either compound alone, or both in combination, would affect performance of the task in terms of reduced error rates over time, and whether changes in alpha-band activity would show a relationship to such changes in performance. When treated with placebo, participants showed a rise in error rates, a pattern that is commonly observed with increasing time-on-task, whereas after caffeine and theanine ingestion, error rates were significantly reduced. The combined treatment did not confer any additional benefits over either compound alone, suggesting that the individual compounds may confer maximal benefits at the dosages employed❞
It promotes a calmly wakeful feeling of serenity
Those are not words typically found in biopharmaceutical literature, but they’re useful here to convey:
L-theanine promotes relaxation without causing drowsiness
L-theanine promotes mental alertness without being a stimulant
Here is where l-theanine really stands out from caffeine. If both substances promote mental focus, but one of them does it by making us “wired” and the other does it while simultaneously promoting calm, it makes the choice between them clearer!
It relieves stress and anxiety
Building on from the above, but there’s more: l-theanine relieves stress and anxiety in people experiencing stressful situations, without any known harmful side effects… This is something that sets it apart from a lot of anxiolytic (antianxiety) drugs!
Here’s what a big systematic review of clinical trials had to say:
L-theanine has other benefits too
We’ve talked about some of the most popular benefits of l-theanine, and we can’t make this newsletter too long, but research also suggests that it…
May extend lifespan ← this one’s a C. elegans study, but despite being a tiny worm, they actually function very similarly to humans on a cellular level; it’s why they’re used so much for anti-aging research
If you’re interested in this topic, we recommend also reading our previous article on l-theanine—pardon that we hadn’t really nailed down our style yet—but there’s a bunch of useful information about how l-theanine makes caffeine “better” in terms of benefits. We also talk doseage, and reference some other studies we didn’t have room to include today!
❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
Keep Your Brain Young (And, Bonus: Learn A Language) With Memrise
When it comes to keeping an aging brain young, language-learning is always one of the top-advised activities. Why is that?
It’s because unlike for example sudoku or chess, it directly works the part of the brain responsible for a critical life skill: communication.
If someone in advanced years struggles with mental arithmetic, or forgets the best 17th move in the Tartakower variation of the Queen’s Gambit Declined, it’s usually not a big deal! But fumbling speech, forgetting words, and failing to keep up with conversations? That has a big impact on life (and mental health).
Memrise is a top-tier way to keep language skills sharp, because unlike some other market-leading language-learning apps, Memrise focuses strongly on audio+video recordings of native speakers speaking naturally, keeping the human touch. This makes a big difference for your brain!
Click here to give it a try now! ← Click through and then on “start learning”; it’s literally that easy
🌎 AROUND THE WEB
What’s happening in the health world…
More to come tomorrow!
📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Stay Healthy, and Lose Weight - by Dr. Herman Pontzer
We all have reasons to want to focus on our metabolism. Speed it up to burn more fat; slow it down to live longer. Tweak it for more energy in the day. But what actually is it, and how does it work?
Dr. Herman Pontzer presents a very useful overview of not just what our metabolism is and how it works, but also why.
The style of the book is casual, but doesn't skimp on the science. Whether we are getting campfire stories of Hadza hunter-gatherers, or an explanation of the use of hydrogen isotopes in metabolic research, Dr. Pontzer keeps things easy-reading.
One of the main premises of the book is that our caloric expenditure is not easy to change—if we exercise more, our bodies will cut back somewhere else. After all, the body uses energy for a lot more than just moving. With this in mind, Dr. Pontzer makes the science-based case for focusing more on diet than exercise if weight management is our goal.
In short, if you'd like your metabolism to be a lot less mysterious, this book can help render a lot of science a lot more comprehensible!
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Wishing you a wonderful week ahead,
The 10almonds Team