Cancer Prevention Tea Kansas City MO

By Peter Jaret

In our household, tea marks the seasons. During the summer we keep a fresh pitcher of iced tea in the refrigerator—“sun tea,” we call it, brewed in a clear glass jar left out in the hot summer sun for a few hours. With the first chill of autumn, we instinctively switch to hot cups of orange pekoe or Earl Grey. Over the holidays we brew up strong tea and spice it with cinnamon sticks and licorice root. Come spring we tend to reach for green teas, flavored with mint or orange peel.

We’re in good company. Next to plain water, tea is the world’s most popular beverage. Enough is brewed, it’s said, to offer a cup to every person on the planet. In parts of China and Japan, where the pouring and drinking of tea has been refined into an art form, it’s not unusual for people to imbibe eight to ten cups a day.

Good for us, researchers say. “Tea is simply one of the healthiest beverages you can drink,” says John Weisburger, director emeritus of the Institute for Cancer Prevention/American Health Foundation in Valhalla, New York, and one of the world’s leading experts on tea. Just consider: Tea’s antioxidants, called polyphenols, can cut heart disease risk in half; and drinking tea protects people who’ve had one heart attack from having another. There’s good evidence that substances in tea protect against several forms of cancer. And now comes word that tea may boost immunity. According to researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a substance in tea called L-theanine primes immune cells to attack invading bacteria, viruses, and perhaps even cancer cells.

Happily, it’s remarkably easy to take advantage of tea’s benefits. For one thing, you don’t have to worry much about which types to choose. Researchers now say that almost any kind of tea—green, black, white, or red—contains potent disease fighters. “Most studies first looked at green tea simply because the health benefits were first observed in Asia, where green tea is the beverage of choice,” says Jeffrey Blumberg, chief of the Antioxidants Research Laboratory at Tufts University in Boston and one of the country’s leading tea experts. “But findings from Europe and the United States show that black tea has the same health benefits.”

That makes sense, since both black and green tea come from the same plant, called camellia sinensis. Black tea is created when the leaves are allowed to oxidize—sometimes referred to as fermenting—which deepens their flavor. But if you heat the leaves to prevent oxidation, you get green tea.

Lately, another variety has hit specialty store shelves, white tea. It’s brewed from leaves and buds of the same camellia sinensis plant, but it’s the least processed of all teas because there’s no heating or oxidation. The leaves are picked one at a time, steamed, and dried. (Because it contains buds that are covered with fine silvery hairs, it brews up a pale grayish color.) A recent study at the Linus Pauling Institute at Oregon State University fou...

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