How tea can be good for health and helps with weight loss

The UK is full of tea drinkers, we don’t think twice about it, in the milk goes, a bit of sugar too and within a couple of minutes we’ve got the perfect traditional ‘English’ cuppa.

Now even if you’re only slightly health conscious and/or want to lose a bit of weight, you might be surprised to know that tea can help you do this. Yes that’s right, tea has properties that are good for our health and can help us lose weight.

In the UK it comes as a surprise to many but the weight loss benefits of certain teas are widely known and well documented in other countries, China for example. The good news is we’re catching on and slimming tea or weight loss tea (they’re the same thing) is probably more popular now that it’s ever been.

So what we’re talking about here is nothing new but in order to be able to gain any benefit from your tea you need to know a couple of very important things, otherwise you’ll be wasting your time.

Firstly, tea is a natural metabolism-booster. The properties in tea can boost your system so everything ticks over a bit faster, without affecting the heart rate. When our metabolism is boosted we burn more calories. So image boosting your metabolism simply by drinking tea and burning extra calories that you wouldn’t normally. Sounds most convenient, yes it is.

BUT – cows’ milk (avoid it in your tea if you want the benefits of the tea)

There are proteins in cows’ milk that neutralise the fat-fighting ability of tea. It has been proven by scientists that if you put milk in your tea you won’t see any weight loss benefits. You tea will simply be a drink that you enjoy the taste of. If you can take your tea without milk (don’t brew it for so long if you don’t like the bitter taste), you will be doing your body a big favour.

Also, if you think about it, it’s not natural for humans to drink the milk of a cow. Horses don’t drink from sheep, pigs don’t drink from goats etc. Milk has become acceptable because it comes in a bottle. Would you go suckle a cow? Of course not. We haven’t got time to cover the issue here but milk is actually very bad for humans. Google ‘why is milk bad for humans’ and enlighten yourself.

It also pays to drink a half decent quality tea

We’ll try to make this brief, but the less money you pay the poorer quality it’s likely to be, does the packet reassure you about quality in any way? Poor quality tea often has no fragrance when you open the box whereas a good tea should have a fragrance even before it’s brewed.

Cheap teas are picked by machine, good teas are picked by hand. With cheap tea a vacuum cleaner-type machine sucks the leaves off the tea bushes which is how bits of twig, stem and plenty of tea dust get into your tea. You’ve probably noticed the dusty mess left in the cup after drinking certain cheap teas. You will notice cheap tea even more if you leave the milk out because milk seems to hide this mess.

Sugar! You may not want to do without it but it’s really not doing you any good

Refined sugar, the white stuff we put in our tea, has calories and not a lot else. Refined sugar lacks the natural minerals which are present in sugar beet and sugar cane and, in addition, sugar leaches the body of vitamins and minerals because of the demands it makes on our digestion, detoxification and elimination

In short, refined sugar is a drain on our whole system and gives nothing back but the prospect of weight gain and, ultimately, health problems. Refined sugar is very calorie-dense. You can easily consume a lot of refined sugar in soft drinks and foods that contain added sugar. It’s not that the sugar calories are more fattening than other calories, it’s simply that calories are calories, sugar has lot and they all add up.

In recent years a lot of research has been carried out in relation to the impact of added sugars (this does not include naturally-occurring sugars in fruit etc). In essence, added sugars can bring about higher triglycerides (a type of fat in the blood), lower HDL (the good cholesterol) and higher LDL levels (the bad cholesterol) in the blood.
Added sugars increase the risk of a poor lipid profile which puts people at risk of coronary heart disease, which is the UK’s and America’s number one killer (1 in 4 die of heart disease in the US!).

Added sugars contribute to diabetes and diabetes-related conditions (high blood fat levels). Diabetes by the way is when not enough insulin is being produced or the body is resistant to it. Without insulin, eating sugar will increase blood sugar. But, essentially, diabetes is not just about blood sugar, it’s about blood sugar, triglycerides (the fat in the blood) and lipid levels.

In summary

Tea is like one of the UK’s best kept secrets. We drink loads of it but as a nation we don’t benefit from it.
Seek out a better quality tea (not one that leaves mucky lines in your cup). There are lots of different types of tea so there’s a huge choice of flavours, and because the tea will taste better, hopefully you will be able to take it without milk. If you have to sweeten it use honey because unlike sugar honey has natural goodness.