Bottoms up! Drinking several cups of green or black tea a day appears to be good for your health.

So far, green tea has been shown to help prevent second heart attacks in people who have already had one, to reduce the infectivity of viruses and bacteria and to protect against prostate, breast, stomach and colon cancer.

At an April meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, Italian researchers showed that men at high risk of prostate cancer who took the equivalent of three to four cups of green tea a day were less likely to develop the cancer than similar men given a placebo.

In the last five years, the U.S. government has funded more than 150 studies on green tea and its constituent chemicals. Green tea’s antioxidants can disrupt chemical pathways inside cancer cells by gobbling up free radicals.

Black tea, which has more complex antioxidants than green tea, appears to benefit the heart in particular, said Dr. Murray Mittleman, director of cardiovascular epidemiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

(The International Herald Tribune, www.iht.com, July 2005)
Article URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/27/news/sntea.php, 2005