A lion-hearted drive: do you have a lion in you to hunt for all natural foodstuff?
In the world round you would have Black tea with milk & refined sugar. Then again, in most of the Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka & Malaysia, particularly in wayside restaurants, you would enjoy a cup of Black tea mixed with sweetened condensed milk & refined sugar, with frothy foam formed by pouring the beverage between two cups. Foam is a result of intake of air during the extravagantly lofted pouring between the two cups of Black tea. Hilarious is the sight; delicious is the cup of Black tea.
But then, either of those cups of Black tea would be far from the healthiest beverage we would like to propagate: sugar in the condensed milk & then again a teaspoonful of refined sugar into the beverage would cause the virtues of Black tea killed. While you could enjoy Black Tea with milk & sugar at the daily meal hours, Black tea, the healthiest beverage, outside of the ordinary meal hours would ideally be devoid of milk (1) & sugar.
Sugar is healthy; sugar is vital to human body, but then the overproduction of sugar in your body due to poor food habits isn’t healthy: even non-sweet foodstuff such as bread, mayonnaise, ketchup, peanut butter end up producing excessive sugar. The excess sugar in the body metabolism cause any or many of the numerous medical complications ranging from diabetes, obesity, suppression of immune system, mineral imbalance, and elevation of harmful cholesterol, kidney damage, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases to speeding up the aging process.
Among the food that made Americans fatter are “added sugars”. In 1961 Americans consumed 2883 calories per person while 515.75 were from “added sugars”. Then forty years later in 2000, Americans consumed 3817 calories per person while 665.82 were from “added sugar”. While there is a need to cut down on ‘added sugar” (sugar added to food as an ingredient), there is no need at all to cut down on natural food such as fruits which have a high sugar content.
Black tea with natural sugar
Though sugar has no healthy substitutes, we can always distinguish between the natural sugar & chemically processed sugar. Common refined white sugar is beet or cane sugar chemically treated with sulphur dioxide, lime, phosphoric acid, and bleaching agents. In the chemical process sugar was stripped off all vitamins or minerals. As such necessary metabolism of refined sugar rely on the body’s reserve of vitamins and minerals. When your body runs out of these reserves, metabolization of cholesterol and fatty acid is arrested. That has the adverse effects such as higher level of cholesterol.
Black tea with Palm Jaggery
Among the all-natural sugar alternatives are unprocessed sugars produced by means of boiling natural juices: most of the minerals & nutrients are retained. They can be made from various sweet juices such as sugarcane, palm, date, maple, etc. Palm sugar is produced from various palm trees such as the kitul palm, palmyra palm, coconut palm grown in South Asia & Southeast Asia.
Black tea with Kitul Palm Jaggery
In the rural areas of wet and intermediate zones of Sri Lanka Kitul palm (fishtail palm) (Caryota urens) tapping generate a sizeable proportion of rural economy which needs to be supported & developed. Kitul sap is the base for local beer (tody), treacle and jaggery. While men in these areas tap the inflorescence (a flowering structure that consists of more than one flower and usually comprises distinct individual flowers) and collect the sap, women boil the treacle and produce the jaggery. Kitul jaggery is extensively used in preparing a wide variety of Sinhalese sweets of Sri Lanka.
