In Japan, green tea is served free at almost all restaurants. In particular, at sushi restaurants, a large cup of green tea is served and the guests there drink a lot of green tea as they eat sushi. Nowadays, sushi is one of the globally known foods, but when you saw it for the first time, you probably had a kind of resistance towards sushi as it has raw fish or raw seafood. You might have wondered if the food was hygienic enough to eat. At sushi restaurants, extreme care is taken in preparing sushi, and therefore it is safe to eat. However, to ensure the hygiene, green tea is served. Why green tea?
There are two reasons. First of all, green tea helps you swallow sushi easily as this food does not contain much fluid. Secondly, green tea has a health benefit to weaken germs and toxins so that you can prevent food poisoning.
Green tea contains the natural element called catechin. Half of the catechin is called epigallocatechin gallate. Its short form is EGCG. EGCG has a mechanism to destroy the top films and walls of germs and toxins. It is because EGCG attaches to the germs and toxins instantly and weaken them. This means that EGCG works just like an antitoxin antibody.
Also, EGCG is tough against acid and therefore it can go through your stomach and small intestines, and eventually it reaches the large intestine. Through these processes, EGCG kills germs and toxins within.
The above explained health benefits of green tea have been proven through various experiments and researches. These studies were carried out to seek solutions when a serious food poisoning occurred in the middle of 1980’s. One of the studies is the experiment conducted about the toxin called O-157. The results show that about 10,000 toxins were killed by 1ml of green tea within 3~5 hours. The concentration of the green tea used for this experiment is the same as that of the green tea we usually drink. This means that you do not have to drink a large amount of green tea to combat with food poisoning and also you do not have to drink highly concentrated green tea. Having said that, make sure that the green tea is prepared with hot water of which temperature is about 85℃ so that sufficient catechin can be extracted.
It is also suggested pouring green tea drinks over all chopping boards on which you cut raw fish or meat. For this, preparing a spray of green tea in advance will be handy.