Why Tea is Good For You

A trip to the supermarket to find something to drink will provide you with a host of new ideas from smoothies and shakes to herbal drinks and new types of coffee.  Yet one of the best drinks around is also one of the oldest – tea.  So why is tea good for you?

Real tea

When it comes to picking ‘real’ tea then there are actually only four types, all from the plant called Camellia sinensis – green, black, white and oolong.  All other teas such as herbal teas come from different plants and aren’t technically tea.

While the variety of tea might not be huge, it certainly makes up for it in the amount of good stuff crammed into every lead.  Most of these health benefits come from two compounds – polyphenols, a type of antioxidant and phytochemicals.  But what do they do?

Benefits of tea

There is evidence to show that drinking tea can reduce the chance of someone having a heart attack.  Similar evidence also points to the drink’s ability to protect the body against degenerative diseases as well as those affecting the cardiovascular system.  Green tea, in particular, has potential to help combat neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s due to these helpful polyphenols.

Antioxidants are getting a lot of good press in recent times and they are also present in tea.  Scientists think that they could help to combat cancers of the breast, colon, skin, lung, stomach, pancreas, liver, prostrate and also ovarian cancers.  They are no miracle cure, of course, but anything that could help is a good thing.

Free radicals are seen as equally as bad antioxidants are food.  But tea contains a high ratio of something called Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity, which means that it helps to destroy those free radicals.  Our bodies naturally fight off these little pests but aren’t totally effective so giving them a helping hand never hurts.

Tea has been shown to help in the fight against weight gain.  One study showed that participants that regularly drank hot tea had a smaller waist and lower BMI than those in the study that didn’t.  Scientists believe this is because drinking tea lowers the chance of metabolic syndrome, which increases the chance of someone having a stroke or developing artery disease or diabetes.

Green tea has been shown to boost exercise endurance because it contains an antioxidant known as catechins.  These boost the ability of the body to burn fat as fuel and accounts for an improvement in muscle endurance.  It has also been shown to improve bone mineral density and strength.

Green tea has also tested high in its ability to help the body process sugars and therefore is a helping hand for those with Type 2 diabetes.

Getting Starting

With all these potential health benefits, drinking tea is not only refreshing and tasty but a boost to the body in a host of different ways.  Why not share the tea message by treating a friend or loved one to their own personalised teapot and show the benefits of a good cuppa for everyone?