A lot of us are endlessly obsessed with coffee, but it would appear that regular tea drinkers are also very healthy in the head, according to the results of a new study published in the journal Aging.
The researchers say that regular tea drinkers have better-organized regions of the brain and that's usually associated with healthy cognitive function. “Our results offer the first evidence of positive contribution of tea drinking to brain structure, and suggest that drinking tea regularly has a protective effect against age-related decline in brain organization,” says Feng Lei, an assistant professor in the psychological medicine department at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore.
Regular tea drinkers have health benefits
This is not the first study that found a positive effect of tea intake on your health. Other than healthier brains, it's also about mood improvement and the prevention of cardiovascular diseases. Another study conducted by Feng, published in 2017, showed that regular tea drinkers have a 50 percent lower risk of cognitive decline.
So what does brain efficiency mean? Feng explains: “Take the analogy of road traffic as an example—consider brain regions as destinations, while the connections between brain regions are roads. When a road system is better organized, the movement of vehicles and passengers is more efficient and uses less resources. Similarly, when the connections between brain regions are more structured, information processing can be performed more efficiently.”
“We have shown in our previous studies that tea drinkers had better cognitive function as compared to non-tea drinkers. Our current results relating to brain network indirectly support our previous findings by showing that the positive effects of regular tea drinking are the result of improved brain organization brought about by preventing disruption to interregional connections,” he adds.
What type of tea should you drink? You can either go for green tea, black tea or oolong tea at least four times a week and the brain will benefit from it in the long run.
Featured image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay