As you may all know, our Digestive Herbs (formerly Tiny Tea) is a mixture of Chinese Medicine herbal ingredients. Chinese herbs are powerful and when combined together correctly like our blends are – they really allow for huge physical and emotional changes internally.

However, we can appreciate that Chinese Medicine can be a foreign concept to grasp – so we asked the lovely Dr. Nat Kringoudis, a TCM Practitioner, to translate our Eastern explanation of the Digestive Herbs (formerly Tiny Tea) benefits into a Western explanation.

Written by Dr. Nat Kringoudis, TCM.:

It can be really confusing trying to understand how your tea works when you have your western medicine hat on.  I remember way back when I was studying Chinese Medicine (TCM) I literally had to unlearn all I had previously learnt about the human body because TCM views the body in a very different way.  However, it is an intricate medicine system within its own right – and it has stood the test of time being perfected over the ages to be what it is today.  What’s more, many of the herbal ingredients we use, have now been researched and their therapeutic affects validated.  So to help you better understand Digestive Herbs (formerly Tiny Tea), today I’m going to talk about how it works in your body.  One thing I now know is how to translate East to West and back again!

The ingredients of Digestive Herbs (formerly Tiny Tea) set to work in your body to maximize digestion and how your gut works.  From a TCM view point, we refer to the ‘gut’ as the spleen and stomach – and the relationship these two have with each other is what make the magic of digestion happen.  So the stomach is the ‘pit’ that the food arrives into and the spleen is like the organ that assimilates foods, draws out the essentials, sends the nutrients around the body to nourish and heal and the bad out to the bowel as waste.  And when this is all happening smoothly, the body is happy – it assists in keeping our weight in check too – because if the bad is being sent out as waste, toxins can’t build up in our body.

When this system of the body isn’t working properly one of the things we can see is weight gain as well as general fatigue, headaches and constipation or diarrhea.  This is because the gut struggles to perform its role – and when we aren’t digesting properly, the body isn’t receiving the nutrients it requires.  This can make us crave all kinds of foods as a means to regain ‘balance’ and restore nutrients within the body.  However, eating the wrong foods will only lead to further damage and weight gain!  This is because your body produces adipose tissue (fat stores) as a way of protecting itself.  In TCM terms this can be referred to as ‘damp’ – much like damp that can sit and become stagnant under your house.  The fat traps in toxins which would otherwise be harmful to you, and literally tucks it out of harms way (your bottom, hips, thigh, stomach and upper arms).  So the fat deposits we see are usually because the liver isn’t doing a good job of breaking down the toxins in the body because it can’t.  And that all starts with your gut – because if your gut function is in all kinds of mayhem, it gets confused between what can be used as nutrients and what should be sent out as waste.  You may have experienced times where you’ve had diarrohea or your bowels have been all over the place – this is because your gut simply didn’t know what to do – and in this confusion, it simply sent it all out as waste. As the ingredients in your tea maximise the inner workings of your gut – meaning they assist the spleen and stomach in this digestion process.  Certain ingredients help to move food through the body and encourage this assimilation in the gut.  Because the gut likes to function at 37 degrees, tea is the perfect mode of transport – it means there is no effort in warming up the liquid, it gets straight to the organ and gets to work.

Other ingredients assist in moving damp out of the body and assists in moving excess fluid out too – especially useful in cases of fluid retention.  These specific ingredients are able to perform these functions as they benefit the bladder to help move damp out via the urine.  There are a few other specific ingredients that perform supporting roles to these herbs in the tea blend – the synergy of herbs mean their benefits are multi layered.

Other ingredients like are able to direct their energy to the liver to cleanse and detoxify which goes to work in breaking up those fat stores as well as benefiting digestion.  Cassia Seed is use for the same reason in a specific dose – because it acts on the liver to assist in cleansing and weight loss.

Other herbs help to promote digestion by increasing digestive energy.

All the herbs tie nicely together to create an environment within the gut that is well supported so that it can work like a well-oiled machine, effectively sifting out the rubbish from the nutrient rich.  As you now understand, a poor working gut will lead to weight gain because it firstly can’t absorb nutrients which makes you overeat and put on the kilograms but also because it can’t sort out the ‘rubbish’ which can lead to toxic build up in fat stores.  The good news is that Digestive Herbs (formerly Tiny Tea) formulations have taken all of this into consideration to ensure you are getting a safe and extremely effective Chinese medicine based treatment.  And the benefits don’t just stop there – because the gut is the pivot of health, many of your other ailments will fade away too!”