What do you do when you have a nutritious, refreshing tea blend that provides all the vital vitamins and nutrients for pregnancy, but your pregnant wife isn’t fond of the flavor so she doesn’t drink as much as she should?
You start researching other pregnancy-safe herbs and essential oils!
I personally love the flavor of NORA tea—it’s light, it’s fresh, and it’s perfect chilled on a hot summer day! But some do find the flavor a bit too “grassy” to handle. That’s why I developed our SuperNORA blend.
My goals were two-fold: improve on the benefits of NORA, and improve on the flavor—in other words, make it a “super” version of the traditional NORA blend. I go into the benefits of NORA here, and talk about how one of the reasons my wife started drinking it was because the nausea during her first pregnancy made keeping her prenatal vitamins down all but impossible. For the new blend, I wanted something to specifically help combat nausea. My research brought me to fennel, but I soon found out it was so much more than just good for reducing morning sickness. Fennel is a good source of Vitamins A and C, as well as potassium, calcium, magnesium, and many other nutrients. It’s also a natural source of estrogen. Fennel can help support bone health, heart health, and good blood pressure. It is believed to help reduce inflammation, improve digestion, and increase iron absorption. Fennel is also known to increase milk production in breastfeeding women, making it an excellent choice for postpartum as well.
Each of my wife’s pregnancies were during the winter, with our children born either late winter or early spring. During that first pregnancy, my wife caught a flu bug just a few weeks prior to giving birth. I couldn’t imagine anything more miserable than being 35 weeks pregnant and having a stomach flu! So for SuperNORA, I wanted something that would also help the immune system fight off sickness. Rosehips are high in both Vitamins A and C, with roughly 20 times as much Vitamin C as an orange! Rosehips can also help reduce inflammation, and contain a variety of antioxidants; including carotenoids, flavonoids, polyphenols, and catechins.
But neither of these things helped much with the flavor. And that’s when a “happy little accident” occurred. I have loved Earl Grey tea for many years (more on that in another blog post!) so I decided to add some Bergamot essential oil to the SuperNORA blend for flavoring. What I inadvertently bought, however, was Bergamot Mint essential oil—a very different plant! Realizing my mistake, I began researching Bergamot Mint. I discovered that, aside from its lovely flavor and smell, Bergamot Mint is known for it’s calming, stress-relieving effects, ability to help reduce headaches and tension, and improve digestion. The flavor balanced perfectly with the other ingredients to make a delicious, uplifting blend. And the best part of all: with the inclusion of Bergamot Mint, my wife finally loved the flavor and was willing to drink it daily!
With it’s high Vitamin C content, SuperNORA has become a staple in our home—not just during pregnancies, but as a refreshing, immune-boosting tea served steaming hot on chilly mornings, or sipped chilled from a Mason jar on a hot summer day. We hope you’ll make SuperNORA a part of your family’s life too!