Black Tea Benefits – Lower Blood Sugar

When next you’ve got the chance to try black tea – Forget the five thousand years of use in Asia and consider instead about the many health benefits that Black Tea could bring to you, which now include reduced blood sugar levels.

You’ve probably heard about how black tea improves protection and heart health, now research appearing in the June 30, 2009 issue of the book of Food Science, adds diabetes treatment to the list of ailments where a cup of dark tea ( without milk or sugar ) might be just what you need.

The up to date research out of Tianjin school in China revealed 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 natural polysaccharide compound in black tea is at levels greater than in either green or oolong tea.

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

This is the way in which the prescribed drugs work also.

Research has proven for a while that polysaccharides might be valuable to those with diabetes because they help stop the assimilation of sugar. According to the researchers, the black variety of tea was also found to have the best scavenging effect on free radicals, those worrisome compounds assumed by many to be involved 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 in your treatment 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 techniques, 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 really the quantity of processing that makes the difference in the color, the black having oxidized ( interacted with oxygen until the leaves darkened ) as it goes through all of the steps in the tea creation processes. Traditional processing of the black variety is not anything like fermenting, there isn’t any yeast involved, just the tea leaves and oxygen.

It is important to grasp that due to the way black tea is manufactured, it does have a way 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, that has from sixty five to 175 milligrams of caffeine per cup.

In fact, in several parts of the Earth tea, not coffee is employed as the wake-me-up at the start 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 packed as a single tea or as an element of a blend – you will be dazzled at the many selections. You’ll be wanting 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 pleasant, pot-bellied teapot so they can unfurl all of the way to form a drink that’s’s tough and delicious, and highly likely good for you too!

The black tea benefits are certainly galvanizing, and with this research we might 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.