Black Tea Benefits - Lower Plasma Sugar Levels

By Kirsten Whittaker

When next you have the chance to drink black tea - Forget the 5,000 years of use in Asia and consider instead about the multiple health benefits the Black Tea might bring to your body, which now include reduced blood sugar levels.

You have most likely heard about how black tea improves immunity and heart health, now studies appearing in the June 30, 2009 issue of the journal of Food Science, adds diabetes treatment to the list of infirmities where a cup of dark tea ( without milk or sugar ) could be just what you want.

The up to date work out of Tianjin school in China found that black tea contains a compound that works just like oral medicines Precose and Glyset - prescription drugs currently used to manipulate blood sugar levels for patients with type 2 diabetes.

The naturally occurring polysaccharide compound in black tea is at levels greater than in either green or oolong tea.

Haixia Chen and colleagues report that the polysaccharides discovered in black tea restrict the activity of an enzyme known as alpha-glucosidase that transforms starches to sugar.

This is the way the prescription drugs work also.

Research has shown for a while that polysaccharides might be of value to those with diabetes because they help stop the assimilation of sugar. According to the researchers, the black spread or tea was also found to possess the best scavenging effect on free radicals, those stressful substances assumed by many to be concerned in the development of cancer and other illnesses.

So can you drink black tea in the place of an oral diabetic medication?

No - Never make a change like this in your treatment without talking with your own doctor.

Chen's team must not say for sure that just drinking the tea would be adequate. The study used chemical extraction methods, not the brewing as you might at home, to get the polysaccharides from the teas they'd purchased at local markets.

Traditional teas come from the same plant. It's essentially the amount of processing that makes the difference in the color, the black having oxidized ( interacted with oxygen till the leaves darkened ) as it goes thru all of the steps in the tea making process. Conventional processing of the black variety is not anything like fermenting, there isn't any yeast concerned, just the tea leaves and oxygen.

It is important to know that due to the way black tea is manufactured, it does have a much higher caffeine content than the other teas - green, white or oolong. One cup of black tea has about fifty mg of caffeine when compared to coffee, which has from sixty five to 175 milligrams of caffeine per cup.

Actually, in several parts of the Earth tea, not coffee is employed as the wake-me-up at the beginning of the day.

You should buy teas at most grocery stores, or try the organic types from online ( or local ) natural health food stores.

Black varieties can be packaged as a single tea or as a part of a blend - you will be amazed at the various selections. You'll be wanting to try several brands to find the flavour and depth of color you like best, and be certain to brew the leaves lose in a pleasant, pot-bellied teapot so they can unfurl all of the way to form a drink that is's robust and delicious, and highly likely good for you too!

The black tea benefits are definitely galvanizing, and with this research we could be close to another discovery for regulating blood sugar levels. - 29887

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