Monday, January 2, 2012

Wonderful | Health Benefits | Of White Tea

Are you a big tea drinker?

Everyone basically knows about black tea (regular tea bags) and green tea, but what about white tea? It’s said that white tea has more health benefits vis-a-vis black or green tea.

Simply put,white tea is a kind of tea that has silvery white hairs on the buds giving it its name. White tea is highly revered in the Orient, it’s prepared for maximum health effect. White tea buds are picked in the early spring and great care is taken to pick the best of the best leaves and buds for the tea production. And picking is prohibited during inclement weather.

There are several white tea varieties, each of a different quality. The best is Silver Needle. Other types include White Peony, Long Life Eyebrow and Tribute Eyebrow. The process to create white tea involves much less processing than either black or green tea so it maintains more of its integrity in terms of health benefit. Drinking a daily cup or two of white tea is said to be filled with life-preserving antioxidants. Moreover, the tea has a naturally sweeter taste juxtaposed with the other types.

One of the central reasons that people drink green tea is its antioxidant properties and its contributions to weight loss. White tea is filled with many kinds of antioxidants like catechins and flavonoids. Antioxidants are substances that fight free radical damage in the body.

Free radicals are produced from pollution, exposure to the sun, the foods we eat and chemicals. They attack healthy cells and cause premature aging as well as diseases like cancer. Antioxidants surround free radicals and neutralize them before they can do any more damage to your body.

White tea uses these antioxidant properties to promote health in the body. For one, the flavonoids in white tea work to prevent the growth of cancerous cells. Antioxidants boost the immune system so that invading viruses, bacteria and other organisms are defeated by immune system cells.

White tea antioxidants also protect the heart and circulatory system. They lower cholesterol levels and prevent hypertension (high blood pressure). Clearly,a heart that has to pump harder to move blood throughout the body is certainly at an increased risk for heart attacks.

Catechins help by lowering the level of bad LDL cholesterol; they eliminate the formation of hard cholesterol plaques which narrow blood vessels and lead to blood clots. Strokes are a possible result of blood clots that break off and travel through the body and lodge in a vessel in the brain.

The Cherry on the sundae...In keeping with its high level of antioxidants, white tea contains minerals that help build healthy bones and teeth. Both of these are important as we age.

So if you wanna switch it up, then you might wanna try white tea for a change.

A Simple, But delightful Tea Recipe:
I used to do this back when I bought a big thing of white and green tea from my local oriental store …

Simply boil some water, enough to fill a large tea container
Get 3 of each type of tea bag, so 3 white teas, 3 green teas
Steep both in the same water, and pour into the tea container.
You can lightly sweeten if you’re still trying to kick the sugar habit (you could use a natural sweetener with less calories than sugar, or even artificial sweeteners if you’d like) … OR … you can just leave it be with no sweetening and eventually your taste buds will get used to the subtle tastes of different teas.

If you make tea like this and drink it all the time, you’ll be doing a world of health for your body for sure! You’ll be getting scores of antioxidants and other good stuff to boot from two of the most healthy types of teas out there. Better yet,it tastes pretty good too! Click here to learn more...

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