Tea : More Than Just a Cup of Beverage

If you enjoy wrapping your hands around a warm cup of tea, you might want to make it a habit. And grab a second and third cup as well, because the evidence continues to mount that the brew is good for you.Heart health is the most notable benefit, said Jeffrey Blumberg, director of the Antioxidant Research Laboratory at Tufts University: "People who drink more tea do appear to have less risk of heart disease, and for those who have developed some cardiac event like a heart attack, those who are tea drinkers seem to have a lower incidence of a second event."

Green Vs Black

The protective effects of tea, the second-most-consumed beverage in the world after water, has been the focus of thousands of scientific studies, said Joseph Simrany, president of the Tea Association of the United States, a trade group.

Much of that research has focused on green tea, but "the data from green and black are really overlapping," Blumberg said.

Not too surprising, he said, since popular varieties of tea -- green, black, oolong and white -- are from the same evergreen shrub, the Camellia sinensis, and the difference is from levels of maturity when picked and oxidation when processing.

So-called herbal teas or tisanes are not teas, but infusions of boiled water with leaves, roots, bark and/or flowers.

Researchers suspect that natural components in tea, particularly a class of polyphenol antioxidants known as flavonoids, are responsible for tea's health benefits

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Blumberg said the nutrients are "very similar to those that you find in fruits and vegetables, in tree nuts, in soy." By drinking tea "you're adding more plant food to your diet," he said.

Tea's increasingly high health profile has propelled its popularity. Retail supermarket sales in US  passed $2.15 billion in 2010; for the first time ever, more tea was exported to the U.S. than the United Kingdom.

When you add sugar or buy it sweetened, you turn a zero-calorie beverage that's great for hydrating the body and has half the caffeine of coffee into a drink "loaded with sugar and calories, sometimes as much as soda," said registered dietitian Andrea Giancoli, an American Dietetic Association spokesperson.

The effect of adding milk to tea is unclear, Blumberg said.

How much should you drink?

"Three cups throughout the day is prudent from a physiological point of view," said Lenore Arab, a nutritional epidemiologist and tea researcher at the University of California-Los Angeles. "Many healthy populations drink as many as six cups per day."