When next you’ve got the chance to drink black tea – Forget the 5,000 years of consumption in China and think instead about the multiple health benefits the Black Tea might bring to your body, which include lower blood sugar levels.
You’ve probably heard about how black tea improves immunity and heart health, now research appearing in the June thirty, 2009 issue of the book 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 research out of Tianjin University in China found that black tea does contain a compound that works just like oral medications Precose and Glyset – prescribed drugs now used to manage blood sugar levels for patients with type 2 diabetes.
The natural polysaccharide compound in black tea is at levels greater than in either green or oolong tea.
Haixia Chen and colleagues report that the polysaccharides found in black tea restrict the activity of an enzyme known as alpha-glucosidase that changes complex carbohydrates to sugar.
This is the way the prescribed drugs work also.
Research has proven for some time that polysaccharides might be of value to those with diabetes because they help stop the absorption of sugar. According to the team, the black assortment of tea was also found to possess the best scavenging effect on free radicals, those worrisome substances believed by many to be involved in the development of cancer and other sicknesses.
So are you able to drink black tea in place of an oral diabetic medication?
No – Never make a change like this without chatting with your own doctor.
Chen’s team must not say for sure that just drinking the tea would be adequate. The research used chemical extraction methods, not the brewing as you might at home, to get the polysaccharides from the teas they’d bought at local marketplaces.
conventional 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 till the leaves darkened ) as it goes through all of the steps in the tea creation processes. Conventional processing of the black variety is not anything like fermenting, there is no yeast involved, just the tea leaves and oxygen.
It’s important to know that because of the way black tea is processed, it does have a far higher caffeine content than the other teas – green, white or oolong. One cup of black tea has about fifty mg of caffeine compared to coffee, which has from 65 to 175 milligrams of caffeine per cup.
Actually, in several parts of the planet tea, not coffee is used as the wake-me-up at the beginning of the day.
You should 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 an element of a mix – you will be dazzled at the numerous choices. You will need to try several brands to find the flavour and depth of color you like best, and be sure to brew the leaves lose in a nice, pot-bellied teapot so they can unfurl all the way to make a drink that is’s robust and delicious, and highly likely good for you too!
The black tea benefits are definitely impressive, and with this research we may be close to another discovery for controlling 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.
