How would you like a cup of tea that can improve your endurance, boost your mental alertness, burn body fat, lower your stress hormone levels and improve your memory?

These are just a few of the benefits of switching from the traditional Tetley to green tea, especially on match days.

Green tea has been used for generations by the Chinese and is well researched in modern medicine with many more studies ongoing. It's certainly not snake oil. All the claims have backing in modern science.

I'm sitting here writing while eating a sumptuous bowl of berry, cinnamon and vanilla porridge and, get this, the meal is good for my health and my cricket. Now that's nutrition we can all love.

Picture the scene, a normal summer's day somewhere in England. Let's assume it's not raining for a moment. A group of weary club cricketers have made their way into the tea room for a hearty refuelling. Their whites are grass stained, their brows still glowing with the sweat of a hard afternoon in the field.

Who has time these days to eat well? The answer could be a little device for your kitchen called the Magic Bullet.

As you know, I'm a fan of the nutrition advice of John Berardi. He knows how to get the best from sports performers. I have been adapting his PN system for cricket for nearly a year now. It works brilliantly.

Here are 7 foods I use to help meet my cricket nutrition goals, chances are they will help you too.

Imagine you are sitting down in a lecture hall for your first day of cricket nutrition school. Pretty much the first thing you are going to learn is that calories are key.

You will be told that 99.9% of people are the same from international arena to village green: If calories burned are greater than calories eaten you lose weight. And vice versa.

Even as a pre-harrowdrive teenager I knew that carbs gave you energy. I had heard about long distance runners loading up on the bread and copied the stamina-booting technique.

I figured more carbohydrates means more energy to perform on the pitch. I filled my face with delicious pasta.

Science was on my side too. My degree course showed me that carbohydrate loading does indeed boost stamina levels in endurance athletes. As club cricket usually lasts all day the analogy fit perfectly.

Pasta, vegetables and good old chips. Not all carbs are created equally, but carbs are a part of a cricketer's diet.

Even the nutrition experts can't agree on the best way for sports players to use carbs. Conflicting research, fad diets and the vested interests of food companies all make things very confusing.

An average club cricketer might spend a few hours a week improving their game.

You might play a couple of games, go to the gym and train in the nets regularly.

What about the rest of the time?

What you do outside of this time also has a huge effect on your performance. Getting the edge and playing good cricket at any level requires good intense training. It also needs attention to the other hours in the day.

This idea is often known as the 24 hour athlete.

Fat, we have all been taught, is the enemy to health and sport performance. We must lower our fat intake to be healthy. But what if fat has had a bad rap? Can we use the nutrient to improve our cricket?

Lets start with the normally accepted view of fat in the modern diet. You could well think the same, after all we have all be taught it from an early age.