Black Tea Benefits – Lower Blood Sugar
When next you've got the chance to drink black tea - Forget the five thousand years of use in China and consider instead about the many health benefits the Black Tea might bring to your body, which include lower blood sugar levels.
You have most likely heard about how black tea improves protection 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 illnesses where a cup of dark tea ( without milk or sugar ) could be just what you want.
The fresh work out of Tianjin school in China found that black tea contains a substance that works just like oral medications Precose and Glyset - pharmaceuticals now used to manipulate blood sugar levels for patients with type 2 diabetes.
The naturally occurring polysaccharide compound in black tea is at levels higher than in either green or oolong tea.
Haixia Chen and colleagues report that the polysaccharides found in black tea prohibit the activity of an enzyme known as alpha-glucosidase that changes complex carbohydrates to sugar.
This is the way in which the prescribed drugs work also.
Research has shown for a while that polysaccharides might have value to those with diabetes because they help stop the assimilation of sugar. According to the researchers, the black spread or tea was also discovered to possess the best scavenging effect on free radicals, those stressful compounds believed by many to be concerned in the development of cancer and other sicknesses.
So can you drink black tea in the place of an oral diabetic medication?
No - Never make a change like this without speaking with your own doctor.
Chen's team cannot say for certain that just drinking the tea would be sufficient. The study used chemical extraction systems, not the brewing as you could at home, to get the polysaccharides from the teas they'd acquired at local markets.
standard teas come from exactly the same plant. It's really the amount of processing that makes the difference in the color, the black having oxidized ( interacted with oxygen until the leaves darkened ) as it is going thru all the steps in the tea creation processes. Conventional processing of the black variety is not anything like fermenting, there is no yeast concerned, just the tea leaves and oxygen.
It is important to grasp that because of the way black tea is manufactured, it does have a far higher caffeine content than the other teas - green, white or oolong. One cup of black tea has about 50 mg of caffeine compared to coffee, which has from 65 to 175 milligrams of caffeine per cup.
Actually, in many parts of the world tea, not coffee is utilized as the wake-me-up at the beginning of the day.
You can purchase teas at most grocery stores, or try the organic types from online ( or local ) natural health food stores.
Black varieties can be packed as a single tea or as part of a blend - you will be dazzled at the numerous decisions. You will need 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 make a drink that's's robust and delicious, and likely good for you too!
The black tea benefits are actually galvanizing, and with this research we may be close to another breakthrough for regulating blood sugar levels.
Next - just head on over to the Daily Health Bulletin for more information on how to lower blood sugar, plus for a limited time get 5 free fantastic health reports. Click here for more details on how to lower blood sugar.