How green is your tea ?

It's amazing how quickly we have adapted to the concept of drinking cold tea. A few years ago the only time you came across cold tea was when your attention was diverted and when you returned to your cup of char it was freezing cold. The standard reaction then was to spit it out in disgust but nowadays it seems we just can't slurp down iced tea quickly enough and soft drink producers are cranking up the already intense competition.
Next up after Nestea, Rooibos tea and a million others, is bottled green tea, that traditional Japanese beverage adapted to the modern world. We've been smitten by a tsunami of sushi and often been enticed to try out hot green tea afterwards, to round out the experience as it were and now the marketing guys reckon we're ready to move our affections to chilled green tea. Already it's a big seller in Japan where both CocaCola and the Kirin Beer Corporation are major producers and industry officials are pinning their hopes on attracting the growing health conscious market who attribute all sorts of miraculous properties to the beverage.
I think that in their eagerness to get the product onto the shelves they may have overlooked a health advice recently issued by the US Food and Drink Administration stating that contrary to popular belief and follwing extensive clinical tests, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that consumption of green tea reduces any type of cancer, including prostrate cancer in men and breast cancer in women. Now that's a bit of a blow isn't it, especially for me who gave up my early morning fix of caffeine, wooed by the healthy attraction of a cup of the green stuff. Thank God our food authorities aren't so advanced here in South Africa otherwise we might find out some things which we would prefer not to, about our own national cure-for-all-ailments, Rooibos.