Peppermint Tea Benefits
Peppermint tea benefits abound! More than a mere "garnish" sprinkled over your food or a few green leaves floating in your drink, peppermint can revitalize, refresh, and renew your whole being all in just one cup!
If there were an herb that could be considered famous, it's peppermint. Peppermint tea benefits are so numerous that, yes, it takes an entire article to give them justice. Peppermint is one of the most common and well-known herbal teas at restaurants, cafes, health food stores, and homes. Peppermint is a truly powerful healing herb. There are many ways to use peppermint tea, even beyond drinking it. It could be used as an eye wash, a facial toner, or even a diffuser. So let's make a cup of tea while we take a look at the top 25 peppermint tea benefits waiting for you in your cup.
Top 25 Peppermint Tea Benefits
- Cures a Stomach Ache - It's the menthol in the mint that will cool and soothe your stomach from all those aches and pains.
- Relieves Indigestion - Peppermint tea helps those enzymes absorb your food as well as soothes your muscles so they can do the work of digestion.
- Helps with Weight Loss - Mint naturally helps eliminate toxins and waste in the body and helps stop unnecessary food cravings.
- Heals a Head Ache - if you've ever felt the misery and torment of a head ache that just won't go away, drinking a strongly brewed cup of peppermint tea will rescue you. It helps relax your blood vessels and any tight muscles you may have.
- Alleviates Hay Fever - Peppermint acts as an antioxidant that blocks the elements that bring the onset of hay fever. When you're suffering from hay fever or other allergies, all you need to do is try drinking a well-steeped cup of peppermint tea.
- Eases Pain of Shingles - Shingles can be painful. Itching and sensitive skin calls for relief. Bringing a peppermint tea compress or even the macerated fresh leaves applied to shingles can bring comfort to the pain.
- Increases Memory and Alertness - It's those stimulant qualities of mint that wakes you up whether it be inhaling the aroma of fresh leaves or invigorating yourself with a cup of tea. Once again, peppermint tea benefits are big when your brain needs a boost.
- Helps with Nausea - Peppermint tea is a time-honored remedy that helps calm down and loosen up the stomach muscles allowing nausea to pass.
- Whitens and Cleans Teeth - If you look at many toothpaste products out there, many of them contain mint and often label it as "fresh minty flavor." Its pungent flavor blocks harmful bacteria in your mouth from settling in and helps keep your mouth hydrated.
- Aids in Fresh Breath - Peppermint is anti-bacterial and can kill the bacteria in your mouth that can cause bad breath. While it's found in many breath mints, just chewing on the leaves will do the trick.
- Boosts the Immune System - Antioxidants increase antibodies in your body which are needed for fighting off infections. Peppermint has antioxidants like vitamin C which is an incredible antioxidant for your immune system.
- Offers Stress Relief - When you've had a long, tough day, slipping into a mint bath eases tension associated with your mood and with stress by cooling and calming your mind and your nerves. Instead of having one small cup of peppermint tea, soak in one very large cup of peppermint tea by steeping a few tea bags right into the bath with you.
- Eases Muscle Spasms and Pain - So so good for muscle spasms and joint pain that come on strong or come back again and again, peppermint tea benefits include soothing aching muscles and bringing you relief.
- Helps Reduce a Fever - The main constituent to mint is menthol which cools down your body on the inside. This is what helps to break a fever and can reduce the discomfort that a fever can carry, especially when the fever has gone on for too long.
- Soothes Coughs - Menthol is often used for alleviating coughs. You can often find it in cough drops. Inhaling a cup of peppermint tea opens up your nasal passages and drinking it soothes a sore throat. It helps expel phlegm and lightens your chest from all that coughing.
- Improves Digestion - Peppermint helps activate your muscles for effective and efficient digestion. The aroma alone activates your mouth to create digestive enzymes and therefore encourage healthy digestion.
- Calms and Cools the Skin - When you apply mint to your skin when it's hot, say from a sun burn or just feeling overheated, all those layers of skin tissue and glands cool down and bring relief when it's most needed.
- Adds Flavor and Spice to Every Meal - It's great as a marinade, tossed into salads, gives zing to pastries and beverages and it's popular with lamb, fruit salads, jellies and jams. Peppermint tea benefits can be in just about every meal you eat.
- Helps Repel Insects - Put fresh herb bouquets in your home to repel insects like mosquitoes, flies, ants and even rats. You can also make a mint spray to keep those bugs at bay!
- Deodorizes the Air - If it's freshness you're after, mint brings zest to any room when you hang it fresh, diffuse its' oil or boil the leaves for tea and allow the steam to fill the air.
- Heals Acne - Peppermint is known for being anti-inflammatory and can promote clear skin to those with acne. It's no wonder mint is often found in face washes and other skin products.
- Offers Every Day Nutritional Benefits - There are an incredible surplus of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants in peppermint which naturally support your immune system and helps to repair tissue in your body.
- Supports Nursing Mothers - Mint helps heal cracks in nipples for mothers who are nursing and when your breasts get sensitive from so much use. Whether it be applying mint as an oil or even as a wash from tea it will help cool and soothe the most irritated of skin.
- Stimulates Brain Functioning - Because of its fresh strong scent, it stimulates your brain towards alertness and wakefulness.
- Helps Relieve Diarrhea - Especially for children when it seems nothing else can help, peppermint tea comes to the rescue and can soothe that sore stomach and cure that painful bout of diarrhea.
Ways to receive all the peppermint tea benefits that are waiting for you...
There are so many ways to add peppermint tea into your life. From eating mint chutney to applying mint salve to chapped lips, or from dropping some mint tincture into your drinking water to support your health, splashing mint vinegar on your salad or spraying mint water into the air to freshen up a room, here are 10 great ways to add more mint to your life.
- Drinking Tea - It really can't be overstated, drinking a cup of tea is a wonderful and simple ritual for bringing yourself into the present moment.
- Soaking in the Bath - It's the aroma, its' effervescent color, and the steeped medicinal qualities of the peppermint tea benefits that create the experience of a healing bath for me. And it can be for you, too.
- Use Essential Oil of Mint - I know it can be embarrassing but let's just say it. People fart. When there is too much gas in the stomach, one simple way to help reduce that flatulence is to use essential oil of mint. Put a few drops in a glass of water when you've got gas and start sipping.
- Eat and Drink it Fresh - It's great in cucumber and fruit salads, rubbed into meat, substituted for basil in pesto, added to smoothies, tossed with roasted potatoes, frozen with ice cubes, blended into fresh butter, infused into honey, added to salad dressings, simmered into hot cocoa, stirred into salsa, the peppermint tea benefits can go on indefinitely when it comes to eating!
- Make a Leaf Poultice - Mint is great for the respiratory system and for congestion. Lay a warm fresh mint poultice onto your chest and it will help you breath better when your breathing feels clogged, congested or heavy.
- Grow it - Peppermint is really easy to grow, it grows fast, it spreads easily and grows back year after year. Instead of buying it from the store, try growing it in a pot or right in the ground. It makes it that much easier to harvest it right out your front or back door and because it grows so assuredly you can often get continual harvests throughout the year.
- Gather it from the Wild - I love to gather mint whenever and wherever I find it when appropriate and when there is enough to warrant it. It so evident to my kids that I love all the mints so much that they've brought it back to me from the distant places in the wild where river otters were swimming in the lake and muskrats left their tracks in the mud. It's this kind of gathering that brings so much more to that cup of peppermint tea than buying it as a tea bag from the store.
- Scrub Those Feet - combine 1/2 cup salt with 1/8 cup olive oil and a handful of freshly diced or ground mint leaves and rub all over those hard working feet. This is a great way to honor your feet for all that they do with all the peppermint tea benefits your feet deserve.
- Make Peppermint Shampoo - Put a handful of fresh peppermint leaves and 16 ounces of apple cider vinegar together in a jar. Let it steep for a week or more and then apply to your hair after shampooing. This will naturally eliminate dandruff from the driest of hair.
- Make Mouthwash - For a fresh breath, submerge a small handful of fresh mint leaves in a 1/2 quart of boiling water. Strain and keep chilled for a few days. Gargle and rinse daily.
How to make and enjoy peppermint tea
Super simple. Boil 1 quart of water and add a handful of fresh or dried peppermint tea leaves. Let steep for as long as you want. The longer the better to get all the peppermint tea benefits you can. Let cool to desired temperature and add honey if you want. I find mint has a natural sweetness unto itself and I love drinking it on its own, savoring its full flavor.
The best peppermint tea benefits of all
Sometime, gifts come from the most surprising of places. I've often found those gifts come from mint in the wild. I have had many experiences discovering peppermint and its relatives out in the wild when I was never really looking for it, but for some reason or another, mint was an herb that showed up in my wanderings. In these moments I have learned to harvest it, despite the fact that I often don't have a specific use in mind. I remember one time I spent a rich day foraging, and happened upon some mint in the forest that I gathered even though I didn't have a certain use for it. Upon returning home just before bed, one of my boys had gotten a throbbing headache that brought him to tears. Boy was I glad that I had harvested that mint earlier. It was right there to rescue him from the ache with a strong cup of tea. It's moments like these where peppermint comes in to cool a crisis. By developing a relationship with peppermint and its' cousins over time, you too will experience synchronicities like this one.
While I encourage you to grow mint and work with it in the myriad of ways I've suggested, I want to also urge you to give yourself the timeless adventure of discovering it in those wild places where mint has broken new ground and found its home in those less cultivated places. In the process, you might get the chance to recover those often forgotten traits of developing sensory instincts and coming to the edge of your senses. There are times when I've traveled through thick brush and smelled mint before I could see it. It was on the edge of my senses and only by pushing that edge was I able to actually find it.
We restore our deepest connections through experiencing where something comes from through direct relationship. By connecting with mint and other plants directly and knowing the origins and stories of their lives we break from the usual routines of buying it and learn their cycles and seasonal ways. By gathering mint in different seasons and in different places I've discovered it's best to gather it in the mornings and evenings and when it hasn't flowered. This came about from getting to know a place and the inhabitants that dwelled there. It came from closely observing and returning to a place to see what was growing there next time. It's always an exciting journey of anticipation and discovery.
I've bought mint and other herbs and am grateful these plants are accessible to us in this way, but I've always felt more connected to the life and stories of those plants that I've gone out and gathered myself and nurtured a personal relationship with. And that's one of the best peppermint tea benefits of all.
Additional Resources
There are many wonderful books on mints in general, as well as other herbs. I invite you to look for these books on mint and other plants and herbs to further your learning.
- Mint: Learn the Origins, Recipes and Growing Techniques, All about Mint! By Miles Reise
- The Miracle of Mint: Unlock all the Health, Beauty and Healing Properties of this Amazing Herb by Victoria Lane
- A Field Guide to Western Medicinal Plants and Herbs by Christopher Hobbs and Steven Foster
Interested in being personally mentored in Edible Wild and Medicinal Plants, on a transformational journey of connection to nature, community, and self?
Check out the Twin Eagles Wilderness Immersion Program.
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