Irritable Bowel Syndrome Message Boards | Loose tea vs. tea bags vs. fresh herbs

For peppermint tea, loose tea, tea bags, and fresh peppermint leaf will all work well. Making tea from fresh peppermint leaves is the most time-consuming, but if you have a garden it's a super easy herb to grow, and you can just grab a handful of leaves and crush with a spoon in a cup of hot water. Pretty fast, very tasty!

For dried peppermint, which is by far the most common way to make tea, the tea bags have the advantage of being portable. So, they're easy to keep in your purse or an office drawer.

But, the quality of tea in tea bags is almost always lower than in loose tea. This is because the herb used in tea bags is more finely cut, so it's in tinier pieces. When you cut the herb, you lose more of the volatile oils (which is what makes peppermint effective). So the more finely cut the herb, and the smaller the pieces, the less strong the effects will be. If you're brewing at home, using the loose tea will give you better results. You can also brew tea much more strongly with loose tea, and much more cheaply, compared to tea bags.

I like tea bags for travel so I can't spill loose peppermint all over my suitcase. But for work, I got in the habit of keeping a tin of loose tea and one of those hand-squeezeable metal tea strainers in my desk, which worked really well. I was brewing so many cups each day that it was too expensive to keep using the tea bags.

So there you are - more info about peppermint tea than you ever wanted to know!

- Heather

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Heather is the Administrator of the IBS Message Boards. She is the author of Eating for IBS and The First Year: IBS, and the CEO of Heather's Tummy Care. Join her IBS Newsletter. Meet Heather on Facebook!

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