Tea Could Help Improve Your Brain Health and Cognitive Skills, Study Suggests

Tea is one of the most consumed beverages across the world. Every person has a unique way of making his or her cup of tea by adding some ginger, cardamom, clove, enjoying it with less or more milk!

Now the tea lovers can enjoy their cup of tea without any fear of health issues. According to a new study, if you drink the beverage on daily basis then it will not only act as an energy booster & make you feel relaxed but will also improve your cognitive skills as well as brain health.

The findings of a study, which was published in the journal Impact Journals LLC, showed that individual constituents of the beverage have been related in previous studies to the functions of maintaining cognitive abilities & to the prevention of cognitive decline. Another study with behavioural & neurophysiological measures revealed that there was a degraded effect or no effect when an ingredient was administered alone while a significant effect was noticed only when the constituents were combined.

The Lead researcher, Dr. Junhua Li of Tsinghua University in Beijing said, "Tea has been a popular brew since antiquity, with records referring to consumption dating back to the reign of Shen Nong (approximately 2700 BC) in China”.

In order to conduct the research, the team of researchers examined healthy older participants to two groups as per their history of tea drinking frequency & inspected both functional & structural networks to disclose the role of tea drinking on brain organisation. Researchers also found that tea helps in removing Alzheimers, a chronic neurodegenerative disease that generally starts slowly but gradually worsens.

Li said, "In summary, our research carefully investigated the effects of tea drinking on brain connectivity at global as well as regional scales using multi-modal imaging data & provided the first compelling evidence that tea drinking positively contributes to brain structure by making network organization more efficient".

Tea Health Benefits

• Caffeine stimulates the central nervous system of the body - increases alertness and decreases drowsiness.

• Tea contains a compound called Theophylline that relaxes the muscles in air passages and help people breathe easy. It also increases the heart rate & force of heart contractions.

• Theobromine helps in reducing the blood pressure by improving blood flow & acts as a mild diuretic.

• L-Theanine increases the formation of alpha waves in brain that are associated with alert relaxation.