Is green tea against the WOW in all countries?
 

I was asked if it was against the WoW yesterday by a member.

I know it is against the WoW in Japan. I heard from a friend who went on a mission to S. Korea, that it is not against the WoW there.

Depends where you are in Japan. My buddy in Tokyo says that the members there don't make a big deal out of it.

That's one of those odd artifacts of how we apply the WoW. By all accounts, green tea is extremely healthy.

When I was kid and we went to chinese restaraunts my mom always got green tea.

OTOH my mother also drinks coffee for her "asthma"

Yes. I don't know the reasoning in S. Korea, but green tea is made from camellia sinensis, the same plant that black, oolong, and white tea come from.

Green tea is not an herbal tea or "tisane," which are "teas" made from any plant other than camellia sinensis (and which are not against the WoW's conventional prescription against tea).

At least if we go by conventional understanding, healthiness is not the measurement. If it were, we wouldn't be eating most of the crud from the grocery store in the name of the WoW.

An argument could be made from D&C 89 that the prescription against hot drinks is about healthiness (in that hot drinks are not for the body or the belly), but this would be going against convention (which unequivocably prescribes against coffee and tea and leaves individual members to sort out the relationship between spiritual and physical benefits on their own, or to wrestle with the diverse statements of leaders and varioius common interpretations).

One could also argue that the vagueness in this area is deliberate. The TR question is simply, "Do you keep the Word of Wisdom?" There isn't the same specificity in this question as there was when as a missionary I listed "alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, and harmful drugs" in the fourth lesson.

I have quit caffeine, so I wouldn't drink it. Whatever healthy stuff is in it, to me, doesn't outweigh the caffeine.

Actually, while I was in Korea (96-98), the Area President asked that the missionaries stop drinking it. The reasoning behind it was that some members were offended that missionaries were breaking the WoW, not that it was against the WoW.

Great stuff, btw. I loved it. MUCH better than the pumpkin tea. I had to switch to orange-peel tea instead, which was MUCH more sugary and I didn't enjoy as much.

It was on the list of five "bad" teas we taught when I was a missionary in Japan in the early 80s. "Ocha, cocha... " I forget the rest.

We drank a lot of mugicha. Kind of an acquired taste (wheat tea).

On my mission, temple-going Russians routinely put decaf coffee in front of us.

That's what happens when missionaries teach people that coke is part of the word of wisdom, but caffeine-free coke is not.

I like Mugicha. Cold, with no sweeteners or any other additives.

Me too. We call it "cigarette butt tea".