Vitamin C is essential to healthy skin.
Without adequate amounts of dietary vitamin C, your body can’t form or store collagen. This makes vitamin C a mandatory co-factor in collagen synthesis
A lack of vitamin C in your body causes many of the skin problems including wrinkles, sagging and blemishes.
Vitamin C interferes with enzymes that deposit melanin to prevent blemishes.
Vitamin C also prevents the oxidation and aging of your skin.
However, Vitamin C is also known as sensitive to heat and can be destroyed during food preparation or cooking.
Good news is that Vitamin C in the green tea is known as resistant to the heat.
Catechin can protect Vitamin C from the heat and Vitamin C effect can remains at as high as 80℃ or 176℉ (optimal temperature for brewing green tea).
It is also known that Green tea contains more Vitamin C than matcha because of the growing process. Matcha leaves are grown by shading from direct sunlight prior to the picking while regular Green tea leaves are grown under the direct sunlight all the way.
Sencha contains vitamin c 3 times higher than lemon (Kyoto prefecture website)
Drinking green tea is not only way to get beauty. You can apply green tea to your face or body like popular celebrities.
Famous actress from popular TV series, Desperate Housewives, Eva Longoria has mentioned that she is using green tea for her facial treatment and introduced the ingredients used for her Green Tea Clay Mask in US Weekly Magazine. The ingredients she uses are 1 Tbsp + 2Tsp Pure Aloe Organic Liquid, 1 Tbsp Indian Healing Clay, 2 Tsp Organic Tea House Matcha Green Tea Powder, 1 Tsp Manuka Honey and 1 Tsp Greek Strained yogurt. Wow, it sounds delicious!
In the article posted on Daily Mail, Miranda Kerr has mentioned that she has a special place for green tea in her beauty routine. She uses green tea-infused boiling water for her weekly facial steam. It is said that Green tea isn’t just a great antioxidant that provides stellar anti-aging benefits, it also soothes irritated skin and works to protect skin from the sun and acne. Australian website, ibtimes.com.au, quoted Miranda Kerr’s comment “Fill your basin with a jug of freshly boiled water, add an organic green tea bag to the water, place your head over the basin and cover with a large towel… let the steam envelope your face for a few minutes to open your pores,” It is also mentioned that Green tea not only has anti-oxidant properties but also acts as an anti-aging product.
Vitamin C is key to beautiful skin and the beauty effect will be reduced when the Vitamin C is heated. However Vitamin C stay effective even when heated in the Green tea. Catechin in the Green tea protect Vitamin C when heated.
On Cookinglight.com, Ivan Yeh mentioned about the best matcha paring according to science, not all recipes are created equal if you want to enjoy the full health benefits of matcha. Ingredient paring that maximizes matcha’s antioxidants. Best paring is citrus. Adding a squeeze of lemon to your next cup of matcha, as doing so could greatly increase the amount of antioxidants available for absorption. According to a Purdue University study, green tea’s antioxidants (called catechins) become unstable in non-acidic environments like the intestines, so less than 20 percent of the goodies you sip remain after digestion. But here’s the good news. The researchers were able to increase the amount of catechins available for absorption to as much as 80 percent just by adding a splash of good citrus juice. Lemon works best but any type of citrus juice will improve your body’s ability to absorb the antioxidants.
Purdue University Study by Mario Ferruzzi issued on November 13, 2007(the study was funded by National Institute of Health)
Catechins are relatively unstable in non-acidic environments, such as the intestines, and less than 20 percent of the total remains after digestion.
Lemon juice caused 80 percent of tea’s catechins to remain. Following lemon, in terms of stabilizing power, were orange, lime and grape fruit juice.