More than just a cuppa.

As well as being wonderfully refreshing, tea is also a very healthy drink and is therefore one of those rare delights - something that tastes good and actually IS good!

Here are some of the dry facts regarding tea's health giving powers:

• A cup of tea has no calories except for the few in the milk, which in the case of semi-skimmed is around 13 calories.
• It is chock full of minerals and calcium.
• Regarding the calcium, four cups of tea provide around 16% of of the average person's daily requirement.
• The minerals manganese and potassium assist in bone growth, body development and maintaining bodily fluid levels.
• Tea also contains small amounts of zinc and folic acid.
• Along with a little milk, a cup of tea contains vitamins B6, Riboflavin B2 and Thiamin B1.
• Contrary to popular myth, tea does not contain as much caffeine as coffee. One cup of 190ml contains just 50mg - about half the amount in a similar sized cup of coffee and just enough for a 'pick-me-up'.
• Tea contains flouride too. If you drink 3 or4 cups a day you will be getting up to 45% of your daily requirement.
• It also contains useful amounts of antioxidants, these inhibit the numbers of so-called 'free-radicals' that damage the immune system.

So there you are, tea is pretty healthy stuff and you can even incorporate it as part of a healthy diet regime free of guilt! For more information regarding the healthy benefits of tea visit: www.teahealth.co.uk. There are many links to all sorts of interesting research results and reports in this site.

Also, at the time of writing, it has recently been agreed that tea helps to cool you down in hot weather by raising perspiration levels which assist in taking heat away from the body by evaporation (cooling hot cuppa combats summer heat). It's about time we caught up with this fact! Many people living in hot countries around the world have known this for a very long time. They consider a nice hot cup of 'chai' as just the ticket for a refreshing drink during the heat of the day. So, during the next scorcher, rather than reaching for the coldest soft drink you can find, with all it's attendant unhealthy ingredients such as sugar, aspartame etc., why not brew up a cuppa and get your body to cool itself down?