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Healthy Drinks for Hot Summer Days

Mix Fruit Juice and Iced Tea for Refreshing Flavours Plus Vitamins

Jul 22, 2008

Make deliciously healthy drinks using your favourite fruit juice and black, green or Rooibos teas. Find out which blends taste best and why they are all so good for you.

Fruit teas have been around for a while, in prepared teabags, but making your own with fruit juice is so much more delicious and you can experiment with different flavours.

Iced Tea with a Difference

Including lemon juice in tea could help prevent many infections as it is an excellent source of Vitamin C. Because lemon is a diuretic it also helps to flush out toxins and unwanted bacteria. Fresh lemons are available all year round. Look for good juicy lemons with thin skins that feel heavy for their size.

The bergamot scented Earl Grey tea is usually served hot with lemon, but try it iced according to the following recipe for a refreshing healthy drink:

Drop 4 or 5 ice cubes into a tall glass and pour in 3 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice.
Half fill the glass with cold Earl Grey tea. (Make it with boiling water and allow it to cool.)
Top up with cold mineral water or carbonated water if you prefer.

Green Tea with Apple Juice

We now know that there are enormous health benefits in drinking tea. Ordinary black tea, green and white teas contain high levels of antioxidants – important in preventing cancer as well as slowing down the ageing process. Iced green tea on its own may not be to everyone’s taste, but mix it with apple juice ( rich in flavonoids which fight heart disease) for a delicious healthy drink:

½ glass green tea
¼ glass apple juice
3 tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
6 leaves fresh mint torn and crushed to release the flavour

Mix everything together and then strain to remove the mint leaves. Pour into a tall glass and top up with carbonated water to give this healthy drink a refreshing lift.

Rooibos Tea with Mango and Pomegranate Juice

Rooibos tea has all the antioxidant properties of green tea and white tea with the added advantage that it contains no caffeine. This makes it free of all toxicity and therefore an extremely healthy drink.

Combine this with the benefits of fruit juice. An especially tasty combination is mango and pomegranate juice. In an article on News-Medical.Net in September 2007, Dr Rockwell, D.O., assistant professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Michigan Health System said that pomegranate juice was a rich source of antioxidants and had been shown to lower LDL cholesterol - the bad, artery-clogging portion of one's cholesterol.

Mango juice is good source of Vitamin A, Vitamin B, Vitamin C and iron, so this drink is packed full of goodness:

Make a pot of Rooibos tea and allow to cool.
Into a tall glass mix in equal quantities cold rooibos tea, chilled pomegranate juice and mango juice
Drop 3 ice cubes into the glass and mix well.

Rooibos tea blends well with most fruit juice so experiment with other flavours such as mangosteen , orange or cranberry juice.

Serve these healthy drinks with tasty easy-to-make dips.

The copyright of the article Healthy Drinks for Hot Summer Days in Holistic Nutrition is owned by Elaine Walker. Permission to republish Healthy Drinks for Hot Summer Days in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.