I’ve been drinking year mate religiously for over 12 years now. I turned 58 this year and feel like a spring chicken! I truly believe that I owe much of my incredible health to this revered plant beverage from South America called yerba mate.
As an example, several years ago, I was roller blading in the canyon near my home in Redmond, Oregon. It had just rained delivering a beautifully sunny afternoon in the high desert. I was having a great time and feeling my oats so I was cruising along much faster than normal.
I decided to swing up the hill into the park to extend my ride and prolong the fun. When I decided to leave the park, I took a different path down. Unbeknownst to me, there was a huge puddle of water over the pavement blocking the entire path.
Nothing I could do now but figure out how I was going to fall. I flew high in the air and came down hard on my hip and shoulder. I thought surely this was it. I must have broken something.
Incredibly, I began to stir and felt okay. Nothing broken? I was a blond haired, blue-eyed, post-menopausal woman. I wasn’t’ supposed to have bones that strong. I couldn’t believe it! I got up and skated all the way back scraped and bruised, but not broken.
I have experienced the bone building properties of this amazing beverage so I encourage every woman out there to read this article and understand how valuable adding yerba mate to their daily routine can be to increasing their bone mass and preserving their youthful state.
Here is an excerpt from the Medscape article entitled, Higher Bone Density Related to Drinking Yerba Mate
January 2, 2012 — Postmenopausal women who consumed yerba mate (Ilex paraguariensis) tea had higher bone mineral density (BMD) compared with women who did not drink the tea, Andrea Conforti, MD, from the Program for the Prevention and Treatment of Osteoporosis in Mendoza, Argentina, and colleagues report in the January 2012 issue of Bone.
In this cross-sectional, observational study, investigators identified postmenopausal women in the osteoporosis program who drank at least 1 L of yerba mate tea daily for at least 5 years (n = 146) and matched them by age and time since menopause with an equal number of women who did not drink yerba mate tea. Both groups were fairly sedentary, defined as not being in a program of physical exercise.
The 2 groups were well matched for age, time since menopause, height, body mass, and calcium intake. However, the tea drinkers had a body mass index 1.1 kg/m2 greater than the nondrinkers.
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