Thursday Brief

The politics has become a real dirty game, every politician wants to have its own way, and if that does not happen then he/she  becomes frustrated, angry, abusive  and start behaving in irrational manner. One such classical example in recent times is that of Donald Trump. Now in the recently concluded voting for the USA Presidential election, he has started saying that he will approach the Supreme Court as the election process in various states have not been as per the norms laid down, and why this happened  just because he sensed that Democratic party candidate Joe Biden might win the Presidential race. So what does it proves, political class across the globe behaves in similar manner in many ways. Whether Trump will succeed in his effort to retain his president ship is to be seen.

I am not writing further on politics today, and my other topic is as follows:

Now a days any information which you want to seek is available on fingertips, which can be sometimes very exciting, but at times, this can put you in quandary about what to believe and what not. When you look up information for something specific, you may find  two versions, one positive and one negative.  And heritage to rely on, Luckily for us Indians, we have an ancient culture to fall back upon, and we also have seen how our grandparents have lived or are living. They have also seen their grand parents, so thee is wealth of knowledge that is being passed on. So we can try to verify some of the information based on these sources. The option is to look at articles we read to see if they are based on some scientific research.

While many of us In India have been used to drinking TEA, at least once a day, a time came when all of us were told that drinking tea may be harmful. It was also suggested that we should stick to green tea. Originating in China, tea spread to Japan, Europe, US, UK etc. Early Chinese travellers have described the Indian brew called tea. So it is quite ancient to India as well. So here is little bit of wisdom, a combination of what we perhaps we know about tea and what new research  tell us.

Benefits of having tea:

A lots of research has been done on the health benefits of having tea, which says that it is good for health. This result is based on two components found in tea, namely polyphenol (a type of antioxidant) and Phytochemicals. Also, catechins another antioxidant found mainly in green tea, can boost the body’s exercise endurance. It also helps your body’s metabolism and has anti inflammatory properties. Since anti oxidants are said to help in fighting cancer, tea is rich in antioxidants, therefore can keep cancers at bay, like breast, colon, lung, stomach, and more. Another reason why tea helps in the anti cancer fight is the fact it can fight and destroy free radicals in the body. It is the build up of the free radicals that eventually cause cancer cells to develop and multiply. Tea can also help in keeping cardiovascular disease at bay. Various components in tea can help prevent skin and neurological degeneration and improve your Body Mass Index (BMI). What is more, it is even said to help fight diabetes. It is even said that drinking tea helps keeping Alzhemer’s disease at bay.

The research link:

The latest research paper published about the tea and brain link says, that “ Habitual tea drinking modulates brain efficiency”. A study conducted on healthy older participants based on their tea drinking habits studied the effect on brain connectivity (both functional and structural). The multi-modal imaging data concluded that consuming tea made positive differences in the brain structure.

So in layman’s language, it means that drinking tea can help the brain and its network in efficient working condition. Perhaps, that could be why tea consumption has been said to keep Alzheimer’s at bay, though research has been going on this topic, and Lab’s trials on mice have been successfully carried out and it has been concluded that  tea can even reverse Alzheimer’s disease. However scientists are quick to point out that every result that works in mice may not exactly translate the same manner in humans as well.

But so far as is known that tea does not have too many harmful effects and if we drink in moderation, perhaps we could manage to keep Alzheimer’s away. Based on all the studies and their finding and conclusion, it is proven that there is more to the tea than just refreshing us.

Hope this information will be useful to you all, may be after reading this even non tea drinker will start tasting the tea.

Awaiting for your views/comments/feed backs.

Anil Malik

Mumbai, India

5^th November 2020