Tea Effects

I can’t say enough about all the health benefits of tea but when I read this recent report by researchers at Oxford University it absolutely made my day!

It seems that eating chocolate and drinking wine and tea can improve your memory.  How great is that?  Wine seems to have shown the most benefits in boosting memory, followed by chocolate and tea.  (Of course we’re talking about only a half a glass of wine — I’m sure we all know that our memories don’t tend to improve after say,  a bottle of wine!)

It seems to be the flavonoids in chocolate, wine and tea that improve our cognitive abilities.  These flavonoids have been found in recent studies to help lower the risks of dementia.

The study was done on 2,000+ people between the ages of 70 and 74.  It seems that those who drank moderate amounts of wine scored better in six cognitive tests than their abstaining counterparts.  The chocolate eaters had “significantly” betters results than non-chocolate eaters and the tea drinkers scored better in four of the tests.

Now just calm down for a minute!  This information is not a green light for spending a Saturday night downing a bottle of wine and a bag of M&M’s!  This study also showed that the beneficial effects seemed to level off at about four squares of dark chocolate a day and about a half a glass of wine.  For tea lovers the news is a little better — the benefits didn’t level off until consuming four or five cups.

But the good news is that those who consumed all three — wine, chocolate and tea — did even better on the tests and stood the best chance of not being “cognitively impaired.”

So just to recap — no binge drinking, no “o.d.-ing” on a bag of chocolates.  But, as usual, tea drinking gets the green light for its health benefits!

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