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Not Just for Pleasure: The Many Health Benefits of Tea

Why Tea Is So healthy for You (and How to Get the Most from Every Cup)

Tea isn't just a comforting and pleasant beverage, it also has remarkable healing properties-so much so that it's deemed a sort of "wonder drink" that may be even healthier than drinking water. Here are all the ways drinking tea can lead to a healthier, longer life-and how to maximize both the enjoyment of the drink and its health benefits.

Tea is the second most widely consumed beverage in the world, after water. That's because it's so versatile: You can drink it iced or hot, and there are enough varieties of tea to suit just about any palate (there are over 1,500 types of tea-not including herbal teas).
People have been drinking tea for centuries also because of its health effects. Much research suggests drinking tea-particularly green tea-can fight diseases and even lengthen life. This is due to tea's high concentration of antioxidants called polyphenols, which may contribute to the prevention of cancer, osteoporosis, and cardiovascular diseases. While polyphenols are also found in abundance in fruits, vegetables, and grains-and also coffee in even higher amounts-tea is especially and uniquely rich in particular types of polyphenols called catechins (specifically, EGCG) that may be the most powerful ones of all.

Cancer Prevention

The American Cancer Society explains:

EGCG may help cause certain types of cancer cells to die in much the same way that normal cells do. This effect is important because cancer cells are different from normal cells in that they do not die when they should-they continue to grow and spread.

Although the ACS says more clinical trials are needed to support claims that green tea can prevent or treat any specific types of cancer, it notes the many laboratory studies demonstrating green tea's protective effects against cancer cells. One study, for example, found EGCG to suppress lung cancer cell growth and another found that it inhibits breast cancer tumors. A meta-analysis of 13 studies indicates women who drink green tea have a lower risk of developing breast cancer than non-green-tea drinkers. Like most scientific research, however, there's other conflicting results suggesting black and green tea might not contribute significantly to breast cancer risk-so you probably shouldn't drink tea for the sole purpose of preventing cancer. That's okay, because there are lots of other positive health associations with tea.

Protection Against Heart Diseases and High Blood Pressure

A study of 40,530 people in Japan, where green tea is widely consumed, found drinking green tea significantly lowered the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. (31% lower risk in women, and 22% lower risk in men.) The risk of dying from stroke was even lower: 62% lower in women and 42% lower in men. The catechins in green tea are believed to inhibit the production of free radicals in the lining of the arteries and also help prevent the formation of blood clots.
Regular consumption of green or oolong tea (for at least one year) also has been shown to lower the risk of developing hypertension by 46% for those who drank up to 2.5 cups a day and 65% less for those who drank more than 2.5 cups.
A review, published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, concludes that "green tea and EGCG can be regarded as food components useful for the maintenance of cardiovascular and metabolic health."

Lower Risk of Death from All Causes

The Japanese cohort study mentioned above examined the relationship between green tea drinking and death from all causes. The researchers followed the Japanese adults (ages 40 to 79) for up to 11 years and compared those who drank less than one cup of green tea a day to those drinking five or more a day.
The results? Drinking green tea was associated with a 23% lower risk of dying from any cause in women and 12% lower risk in men.

Brain Boosts

Drinking tea can contribute to both relaxation and concentration. As Tea Class explains:

L-theanine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in the Camellia Sinensis plant. In fact, unless you take an artificially manufactured dietary supplement, tea is the ONLY way to get L-theanine in your diet. This powerful amino acid boosts alpha wave activity in our brains, which promotes a state of relaxed concentration. Think "quiet alertness". The calming effects of L-theanine actually counteract the extreme highs and jitteriness that can result from excessive Caffeine intake.
As with almost all other essential elements in the leaf, L-theanine is most highly concentrated in the newest growth. A high quality loose leaf tea will contain the most L-theanine, and the very highest levels are usually found in green and white teas.

And Lots, Lots More

Studies have also associated drinking green tea with lower LDL or "bad" cholesterol and reduced body fat, inhibition of the flu virus, and even less dental plaque. The book Green Tea by Nadine Taylor also cites these benefits:

• Keeping blood sugar at moderate levels
• Fighting food-borne bacteria
• Enhancing immune system function
• Promoting "friendly" bacteria in the intestines and encouraging bowel regularity
• Assisting in weight loss by blocking the breakdown of starch
• Maintaining the body's fluid balance
• Reducing stress

Taylor writes:

No other substance on the face of the earth, including the most potent drug, can claim such wide-ranging and powerful health benefits, and all without a single side effect.

Well, some side effects have been noted with drinking too much green tea extract or supplements (not the drink itself), and pregnant women might want to avoid large amounts of green tea as well.
It's true that tea contains caffeine, which affects everyone differently, but tea generally contains less caffeine than coffee, and the caffeine in tea is metabolized more slowly, so you can drink more cups all day long without crashing.

How to Choose and Brew Tea for Better Health Benefits

Now that we know some of the many potential ways green tea can make us healthier, let's look at how to buy and brew it optimally.
Types of Tea: Most of the studies have focused on the health benefits of green tea, but what about black and other types of tea? Green tea has more wide-ranging and powerful benefits mainly because of its high amounts of EGCG, whereas black tea has much less because of the way the leaves are "fired" and oxidized during production. Still, black and other teas also share these important compounds and benefits.
Acne Einstein reports these mean levels of EGCG in different teas per cup, as measured by the USDA:

• Brewed green tea: 180mg
• Brewed green tea, decaffeinated: 60mg
• Brewed green tea, flavored: 45mg
• Ready-to-drink green tea: 10mg
• Brewed oolong tea: 80mg
• Brewed black tea: 20mg

The report doesn't mention white tea, which has similar EGCG content as green tea, but might have even more health benefits than green tea because it's even less processed. White tea, however, is rarer than green and thus less studied.
Antioxident content, however, also varies depending on the tea types, brand, and manufacturing.
Tea Brands: Speaking of tea brands, ConsumerLab tested green tea bottled drinks, brewable teas, and supplements to find which had the highest levels of EGCG and other catechins. News Observer reports:

Of the 14 bottled tea and tea supplements that listed levels of EGCG on the label, only three contained significantly less than the amount claimed. The 17-ounce bottle of Honest Tea Green Tea with Honey, for example, had only about two-thirds of the 190 milligrams of the listed catechins, which includes EGCG and other beneficial compounds. (Experts recommend consuming 200 milligrams of EGCG a day for the greatest benefit.)
Among products that don't list EGCG levels - including all of the brewed teas - findings were more varied. Teavana Green Tea Gyokuro Imperial, sold as loose tea, had 86 milligrams of EGCG per serving, while one bag of Bigelow Green Tea had only 25 milligrams. To get the recommended amount of EGCG, you'd have to drink about 2 1/2 cups of the former, eight cups of the latter. (Helpful hint: Steep tea in hot water for three to five minutes to fully extract the EGCG.)

Teavana's is more expensive, however ($2.18 to get the equivalent of 200 mg of EGCG versus $0.27 to $0.60 per tea bag). Bigelow's had the highest amount of EGCG of the bagged, supermarket teas.
Temperature and Brewing Time: Things that additionally affect the EGCG content and antioxidant potential include your water temperature and brewing time. While following general time and temperature recommendations is great for brewing a cup of tea for flavor, if you care about getting the most health-boosting benefits of a cup of tea, Acne Einstein has found:

• Brewing with hotter water results in more antioxidants in the tea
• Steeping for three to five minutes is better than less time

This goes against the usual tea rules for different types (green tea is usually brewed with water at 175 degrees F and for just a minute or so), so you might get a stronger-tasting or even bitter cup, depending on the leaves. Oolong teas, however, often do well with longer steeping time and higher temperatures.
How Many Cups to Drink a Day: Most of the studies suggest the more cups of tea you drink a day (e.g., five or more), the better, but some also found benefits with just two to three cups a day, which is what nurse practitioner and physician assistants network Advanced Healthcare recommends for patients as a "simple healthy lifestyle strategy." (Don't worry, tea is hydrating and doesn't act as a diuretic.) The two-to-three cups a day recommendation fits in with most supplements' 200 mg EGCG recommended daily serving.
All this said, it's silly to guzzle down thermoses of tea if you don't enjoy it. Even if you prefer stronger drinks like coffee, however, you might be surprised to learn you might just enjoy a good cup of tea too (and get the health effects as a nice side benefit).

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Negative Thinking

The Positive Power of Negative Thinking

   

If you want to achieve a major goal, conventional wisdom says to think positive. Picture yourself delivering the perfect presentation, and absorb the energy of the audience. Envision the ideal job interview, and imagine yourself on cloud nine when you get the offer. Although these strategies sound compelling, it turns out that they often backfire. Many of us are more successful when we focus on the reasons that we're likely to fail.

This post originally appeared on LinkedIn.

In a series of clever studies, the psychologists Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor compared strategic optimists and defensive pessimists. If you're a strategic optimist, you envision the best possible outcome and then eagerly plan to make it happen. If you're a defensive pessimist, even if you've been successful in the past, you know this time could be different. You start picturing all the things that could go wrong. What if I spill coffee on the interviewer? What if I accidentally deliver the presentation in a foreign language? What if I forget my own name?
Most people assume that strategic optimists outperform defensive pessimists, because they benefit from confidence and high expectations. Norem and Cantor found that defensive pessimists were more anxious and set lower expectations for themselves in analytical, verbal, and creative tasks. Yet they didn't perform any worse.
"At first, I asked how these people were able to do so well despite their pessimism," Norem writes in The Positive Power of Negative Thinking. "Before long, I began to realize that they were doing so well because of their pessimism... negative thinking transformed anxiety into action." By imagining the worst-case scenario, defensive pessimists motivate themselves to prepare more and try harder.
Strategic optimists and defensive pessimists succeed under different circumstances. If you're a defensive pessimist, or you're attempting to motivate one, the strategies that prove effective are often the reverse of what you expect.

Don't Whistle While You Work

Although evidence shows that happiness often makes us more successful by fostering energy and creativity, it can backfire for defensive pessimists. When strategic optimists and defensive pessimists threw darts, they did equally well overall, but were most effective under opposite conditions. Before throwing darts, some people listened to relaxing tapes ("hear the gentle rolling of waves on a sun-sparkled ocean"). Others imagined themselves throwing darts and missing their targets. When they actually threw their darts, the strategic optimists were about 30% more accurate when they relaxed rather than imagining negative outcomes.
But the opposite was true for the defensive pessimists: they were about 30% more accurate when they thought about negative outcomes, instead of relaxing or picturing perfect performance. Norem's research suggests that "positive mood impairs the performance of defensive pessimists." When they're in a good mood, they become complacent; they no longer have the anxiety that typically mobilizes their effort. If you want to sabotage defensive pessimists, just make them happy.

Encouragement Discourages

We think it's a good idea to encourage people, but not so fast. In one experiment, people completed a drawing task requiring focus and accuracy. Right before the task, for half of the participants, the researcher looked at their grades in college and said, "Hmm, given how well you've done in the past, I would think that you'd be very confident about your performance. You will probably do very well on the upcoming tasks." These words of encouragement slightly boosted the performance of strategic optimists, who did 14% better.
In contrast, the defensive pessimists did significantly worse when they were encouraged, scoring 29% lower. The encouragement boosted their confidence, quelling their anxiety and interfering with their efforts to set low expectations. As Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote, "Reassurance is a double-edged sword."

Don't Worry

When people are anxious, we sometimes tell them to distract themselves. Once again, this doesn't pay off for defensive pessimists. In another experiment, people completed a questionnaire about their styles, and then took a mental math test that involved adding and subtracting numbers in their heads (like 15 + 47 - 73). The strategic optimists didn't benefit from reflecting on possible outcomes, but the defensive pessimists did. When the defensive pessimists distracted themselves with another task right before the math test, their scores were about 25% lower than when they listed the most extreme outcomes that could happen in the test, and how they might feel. Taking time to worry helped them generate the anxiety necessary to motivate themselves.

Save Fantasies for the Silver Screen

Studies show that positive fantasies discourage achievement-when people imagine losing weight or pursing a relationship with a crush, they're less likely to follow through. Also, people perform worse when they say "I will" than when they ask themselves, "Will I?"
"Affirmation feels good," writes Dan Pink in To Sell Is Human. "But it doesn't prompt you to summon the resources and strategies to actually accomplish the task."

We Need the Glass to Be Half-Full and Half-Empty

In the U.S., we favor optimists over pessimists. When economists surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. CEOs, they found that more than 80% scored as "very optimistic."
Optimists tend to thrive in jobs that require resilience and perseverance. For example, in insurance sales jobs with high rejection rates, optimists sold 37% more than pessimists over a 2-year period and were half as likely to quit in their first year. In Learned Optimism, psychologist Martin Seligman reveals that when things go wrong, pessimists view negative events as personal (I'm a terrible public speaker), permanent (I'm never going to get better), and pervasive (I'm going to lose the respect of my colleagues and my spouse). Optimists, by contrast, recognize that when a presentation misses the mark, it's possible that the audience wasn't ready for their message, they can practice and improve, and they can still excel at other tasks and have an enjoyable evening at home.
At the same time, we need pessimists to anticipate the worst and prepare us all for it. On average, research indicates that people who never worry have lower job performance than those who worry from time to time. Studies also show that when entrepreneurs are highly optimistic, their new ventures bring in less revenue and grow more slowly, and when CEOs are highly optimistic, they take on more risky debt and swing for the fences more often, putting their companies in jeopardy. (This may be why there are fewer optimistic CFOs than CEOs.)
Ultimately, both styles are deadly at their extremes. Pessimism becomes fatalistic, and optimism becomes toxic. The key is to find the sweet spot, the more moderate ranges that combine the benefits of both approaches. In the words of Richard Pine, "The best chief executives-and that includes presidents-know that too much optimism is a dangerous thing, that wise and productive leadership means striking a balance between optimists' blue sky view of the world and pessimists' more clear-eyed assessment of any given situation. Take one part salesman, one part inventor, one part lawyer, one part safety engineer, stir gently and you've got a great chief executive."
If you're the kind of person who's always telling other people to look on the bright side, you might want to reconsider. Whether people succeed is not a matter of thinking positively or negatively, but rather whether they choose the strategies that match their thinking styles. As psychologists Heidi Grant Halvorson and Tory Higgins write in Focus, "It's the fit that counts."
And if you're a defensive pessimist, when preparing for a performance that really matters, you might want to list your weaknesses instead of your strengths, and drink a glass of anxiety rather than a shot of confidence.

Muharram begins

Our path-way is to observe Seerat-e-Masoomeen. Our each and every Majlis / Mahfil starts with Recitation from the Holly Quran and ends with the remembrance of sacrifice of Shohda-e-Islam.
And this is a fact beyond any doubt that Azadari-e-Syed-us-Shoda Hazasrat Imam Hussain A.S. played a vital role in introducing and identifying ourselves. This Azadari also helped in image building of Shiat, history of which is spread over hundreds of years.

Our 14th Masoomeen

Hazarat Mohammad Janab-e- Fatima Hazarat Ali Imam Hassan Imam Hussain Imam Zan-ul-abideen Imam Mohammad Baqar Imam Jafar Sadiq Imam Moosa Kazim Imam Ali Raza Imam Mohammad Taqi Imam Ali Naqi Imam Hassan Askari Imam Mehndi

Quotes about Happiness