#42

This is what I use for tea. A double teabag cup daily with also a capsule of Green Tea Extract. But I wonder how much L Theanine I’m getting. Or which has more.

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-green-tea-bags%2c-1.5-g%2c-100-count.product.100334938.html

#43

shade grown Japanese green tea
May I ask the brand and source you use?

#44

I’ve been using tealyra brand for a long time. It is very good quality for a reasonable price.

I use tea for the chemicals and not for the taste. However this stuff tastes very good for tea. Tea leaves need to heated after harvest to stop the oxidation for a green tea and taking out the a lot of the antioxidants. This company steams and then blow warm air across the leaves to dry them. Other Japanese companies will they’ll roast it a little bit to dry to dry it out. But the heat from roasting takes out a lot of the healthy chemicals.

I drink two kinds of shade grown tea the first is kukicha largely the stems of the leaves with a little bit of green. The stems have more theanine and antioxidants and the leaf has more caffeine. This kukicha is from m the highest grade of shade grown tea. But because the leaves been filtered out though it’s very high grade it’s a much lower cost. I started using this tea on purpose because I wanted theanine and I didn’t want caffeine.

Kabuse means shaded.

I also use a shade grown leaf tea that’s got a lot of theanine and a lot of caffeine at least for green tea.

Fully shaded green tea leaves are called gyokuro.

A person can spend a lot of money on gyokuro. I’m more interested in the chemicals in them then how they taste so I usually buy the cheapest gyokuro I can get. On my phone, this next page is mostly gyokuro.

I make the kukicha very strong. I put a tablespoon in 8 oz of hot water Maybe 170°. Hot water makes it more bitter. And because of the stems in it, I usually do three infusions. About 45 seconds for the first then 90 seconds and then two three minutes. The instructions on the bags are for the more commonly used way to make it.

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#45

I buy all my Japanese teas directly from Ippodo Tea in Kyoto
I’ve seen they now have a USA online shop but it’s more expensive and I don’t know if the teas there are as fresh which is important for the Japanese teas.

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#46

Amazon sells tealyra tea as well. They can deliver faster than tealyra so if I am running out I’ll buy from Amazon but prefer not to. Tealyra is generally organic, sells this year’s crop and they can tell me the whether or not the tea has been ruined by roasting. And shipping is fast. When I used to buy directly from Japan it would take weeks and cost an extra 40 bucks for shipping. The main tea I drink kukicha and this brand is my favorite. It is only been steamed and not roasted it’s been shaded for two or three weeks.

For somebody who goes to a lot of trouble to get shade grown tea processed in a particular way, I’m pretty unsophisticated about tea in general. I only care about the phytochemicals

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#47

I haven’t studied chess since childhood (never review my games, study openings or tactics) but still play casually. Nevertheless I have tried to experiment with L Theanine and it has had no impact on my ELO.

Since L Theanine helps with stress it may have a different impact on different people. Chess is relaxing for me (it helps me reduce stress) now as I have no chess related goals. Perhaps L Theanine experiments would have led to a different result when I was a child (I was a chess master and more competitive at that age).

On another note I highly recommend anyone interested in playing chess online to give https://lichess.org/ a try. It’s a non profit (funded by donations) rather than a a well funded conglomerate with a history of acquiring the competition to grow market share.

I find lichess (free and open source) software to be more reliable than chessdotcom. I say this as someone with a free lifetime diamond membership on chessdotcom which I essentially never use aside from occasional Titled Tuesday tournaments.

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#48

L-theanine has different effects of course with different people.
I have found it does nothing for me at any dose and have dropped it from my stack.
My daughter however swears by it and takes it every day.

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#49

I used to work in a drug and alcohol treatment. In addition to the standard stuff, we did brainwave biofeedback including a brain wave assessment. We noticed alcohol addicts have an excess of very active beta waves which can make people anxious and they had a deficit of alpha ways which are the calming relaxing EEG. Alcohol, increases calming alpha waves so there was a rationality to anxious alcoholics with a deficit of alpha waves consuming alcohol because it normalized their brain function.

I was going over the re-analysis of my 23andMe data yesterday and noticed I have 8 homozygous overactive HPA SNPs. These are associated with increased cortisol which is one of the main stress chemicals. Theanine brings up GABA which is a calming neurotransmitter and can balance cortisol overarousal.

I suspect all these mutations related to increased cortisol are why I like theanine so much. I further suspect people who don’t have an issue with overactivation leading to anxiety or hyperactivity probably have minimal benefit from theanine.

I think non anxious people might benefit from theanine when they’ve got a deadline and need to have a lot of caffeine to meet it. The theanine will reduce the hyperness related to the caffeine.

There are many studies that talk about the cognitive effects of these two substances alone and in combination.

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