Lipton, Luzianne and Losers

Granny Good Food believes that Texans do not have blood. There is sweet tea, tea, or Big Red coursing through their veins.

Surprise, Texans also have joint pain, knee pain, back pain, elbow pain and hip pain. Stiff and achy all over. Hard to get up out of the chair to get a refill. Oh yes, and ranked 12th in national obesity, we heard this week.

Problems Plen-tea

Pain, obesity, and tea. So what’s the connection?

If you drink tea, you’ll be a loser. You will lose cartilage (a form of collagen), that cushy connective tissue between bones, discs in the spine, in the elbows, and hips—basically all those places that hurt. In fact, your ‘arthritis’ may not be arthritis at all, but merely an overindulgence in the brown brew.

Tea will also cause you to become hypothyroid and you may lose your waistline, hair, eyebrows, memory, sex drive, and mind, as well.

Ladies, if you consider that your breasts are also connective tissue, you may think twice about indulging in copious cups, lest your “cups” begin to sag. The collagen under the skin is what keeps us looking young, but certain elements in tea destroy it.

Tea and Fluoride

The reason tea causes so much misery is because of its fluoride content. In fact, tea is one of the foods highest in fluoride. Chemically speaking, the fluoride is a halogen, in the same class as bromine, chlorine, and iodine. The iodine receptors get displaced by these other halogens, and the thyroid is unable to function properly. The vast amounts of sugar added to the tea pile on further insult to the endocrine system, specifically the adrenal glands.

FYI, Bromine is found in commercial breads, non-organic strawberries, Mtn. Dew and brominated vegetable oils in citrus-type drinks. Chlorine treats municipal water, but is also found in the sugar substitute sucralose, sold as Splenda.

Tea is also high in aluminum, which enhances the fluoride’s effects. If brewed with sewer water—I mean, city water, then there is the additional fluoride from that source.

Sure the Chinese drank green tea for centuries, and it does have some good nutritional properties. Today’s environment, though, loads the tea up with even more fluoride through air and water pollution. The inclusion of sea foods that contain copious amounts of iodine is a protective factor that compensates for the fluoride in tea.

Fluoride: Politically Protected Pollutant

The Suits selling fluoride to our local water districts won’t breathe a word of it, but the truth is that this same substance being dumped into our water under the guise of being good for our teeth is as toxic as lead and arsenic, is a byproduct of the fertilizer or aluminum industries, and is nothing more than a protected pollutant.

Granny Good Food, being mostly Libertarian with a sprinkle of Jacksonian democracy, will not discuss here the ramifications of a government allowed to medicate its people en masse via its water supply, but suffice it to say that in addition to destroyed connective tissue, brain damage is a very real complication of fluoridated water. This may explain how such noble concepts as inalienable rights to life and liberty continue to be flushed with every fluoridated glassful that goes down the sink.

Fluoride Damage Doesn’t Take Long

Back to the cartilage problem. Granny Good Food has seen first-hand that tea has the amazing power to eat up cartilage in a short amount of time. Grandpa started visiting the Sonic to quench his thirst, ordering tea with the small bits of crunchy (fluoridated) ice, and within a few weeks, his elbow was very painful. Upon touching it, one could feel that the bone had much less cushion, and it was basically bone rubbing bone. After reminding Grandpa that the Prophetess has no honor in her own domain, she had mercy and fixed him up. More on that after one more story.

Shortly after Grandpa’s episode with pain and tea, a mother told me of her 14-year old son whose knees she had to bandage because his cartilage disappeared within a six-month period. This mom shared how they had decided to give up soda and drink tea, and they also made it with tap water. As if this wasn’t enough, this poor kid’s stupid dentist gave him fluoride drops for receding gums. (This is for free: fluoride does not stop receding gums; try vitamin C and Co-Q10). It was a triple whammy. Tea, fluoridated tap water, and fluoride drops. Bam! No more knees!

Repair and Restoration

Copious amounts of gelatin and chicken soup did the trick for Grandpa. Now this was no ordinary chicken soup, and definitely not the usual gelatin from the box with the Red #40 and sundry other nasties. Granny Good Food opened no cans in its preparation. She took whole chickens, put them in the crockpot, added several tablespoons of apple cider vinegar, and cooked and cooked. At the end of the day, the pot was full of minerals that the acid had pulled from the bones, as well as gelatin.

A faster way to get some collagen, but not necessarily easier on the chompers, is to chew the gristle from the end of chicken leg bones.

We used Hill Country Fare Unflavored Gelatin mixed with some fruit juice, about one packet per cup of liquid. This was a very firm gelatin, able to be eaten by hand and convenient to grab as a snack. Gelatin sold with FD&C colors, sugar, or aspartame are not fit for consumption.

Supplements that help are glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate, MSM and vitamin C. Just use water to wash them down, not tea.