Core Tip: On a hot summer day, when you're feeling parched, you can make a pot of herbal tea or some bean soup at home. This not only helps cool you down and rehydrate, but it can also lower blood pressure and reduce fat.
Lianxin Tea for Heart Health and Blood Pressure Reduction
When summer arrives, many people enjoy brewing lotus seed cores in water. The lotus seed core refers to the green germ in the center of the lotus seed. It is extremely bitter but has excellent effects for lowering blood pressure and reducing fat. Use 12 grams of lotus seed cores, brew them with boiling water, and drink the infusion as tea. Consuming it once in the morning and once in the evening has a significant strengthening effect on the heart, as it can dilate peripheral blood vessels and lower blood pressure.
This drink is especially suitable for summer, when the heart is most vulnerable and the intense heat can easily irritate the mind. In addition to clearing heart heat, lotus seed cores can also help treat mouth sores and aid sleep. However, it has a cooling nature. People with a cold constitution, who often feel cold, have cold hands and feet, or have loose stools, should drink it sparingly.
Hangbai Chrysanthemum Tea for Clearing Heat and Detoxification
When it comes to heat-clearing drinks in the summer, many people think of chrysanthemum tea. Huang Li suggests that the chrysanthemum used should be sweet-scented chrysanthemum, which is not bitter. The large or small white chrysanthemums from the Suzhou and Hangzhou areas are the best. Use about 3 grams to brew a cup of tea three times a day. Alternatively, you can boil chrysanthemums with honeysuckle and licorice to make a tea, which has special effects of calming the liver, improving vision, clearing heat, and detoxifying.
However, due to its blood pressure-lowering effect, elderly people with low blood pressure should drink it sparingly to avoid symptoms of hypotension.
Drinking plain water is not advisable when sweating heavily
What should healthy people choose as their daily beverage to quickly replenish fluids and the nutrients lost through sweat?
Plain water, purified water, and mineral water can indeed allow water to enter the body quickly, but they can reduce the concentration of electrolytes in the blood and lower osmotic pressure. As a result, water is quickly excreted as sweat and urine, taking various nutrients with it. Clearly, if you only use plain water as a beverage during heavy sweating, other nutrients can become deficient, and it cannot help the body retain water.
Vegetable and Bean Soups are Effective for Heatstroke Prevention and Hydration
Now, let's look at the various sweet drinks on the street. Almost all of these drinks contain sugar, with low-sugar varieties having 3-6% sugar and regular sweetened ones having about 10%. Many of these are also fortified with Vitamin C. However, they almost never contain B vitamins, and the metabolism of sugar in the body consumes B vitamins. Therefore, drinking large amounts of sweet beverages can even worsen the problem of B vitamin deficiency. The mineral content in these drinks is also insufficient. When sweating heavily, deficiencies in potassium and calcium can easily occur.
In contrast, vegetable juice with a small amount of salt (less than 0.2%, just enough to barely taste a hint of saltiness), or bean soups with a little salt, such as red bean soup, mung bean soup, or black bean soup, are more effective for preventing heatstroke and rehydrating. They can replenish various minerals and vitamins and avoid the adverse effects of high sugar content.