5 Healthy Reasons to Drink Black Tea

You are familiar with black tea already — over 75 per cent of tea consumed worldwide is black tea. Black tea is the “standard tea” in the United States.  If you drink  bottled iced tea or buy generic tea bags at the grocery store, you get black tea. So chances are you have already been drinking black tea in your life. However, you probably didn’t know how much simple black tea protects and improves your health!

1.   Black tea fights cholesterol

Black tea is full of antioxidants called flavonoids and polyphenols. Flavonoids have been shown to help prevent the oxidation of LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, which reduces damage to blood vessel walls and promotes good circulation. Regular tea drinkers are 21 per cent less likely to suffer strokes. In addition, polyphenols boost cardiac health by strengthening and protecting the heart muscle tissue.

While both green and black tea help lower cholesterol levels, because black tea is made from totally fermented leaves then the catechins (a crystalline flavonoid compound or its derivatives with antioxidant properties) are the source of lowering cholesterol rates. Higher fermentation levels lead to lower catechin content, which makes black tea an ideal beverage to improve the results for people who suffer from high cholesterol — even if it’s a decaffeinated version.