Black tea is often the tea of choice for most people around the world. While great for starting your morning off right, black tea also makes a perfect mid afternoon beverage to keep you going through your day. However, beyond simply being a great beverage to drink, tea is also rich in health properties and there are many claims of black tea benefits.

Tea, in fact, is so well regarded for curative powers that some of China’s earliest documents, over 4700 years old, proclaim tea as a magic elixir from heaven. Even modern scientists agree that tea, in all its varieties, is an ideal beverage to consume and is loaded with health benefits. Black tea comes from the same tea plant green and white tea comes from. However, once harvest, black tea is allowed to oxidize, giving it a bolder, stronger flavor and a darker color. Here are some health benefits stemming from consuming black tea regularly.

Mental Alertness – Black tea comes naturally infused with caffeine, making it a potent wake up agent that helps you start your day and keep going strong throughout. While not as strong as coffee, black tea contains caffeine in more healthy doses that comes with less adverse side effects, increasing both physical and mental awareness.

Antioxidants – Perhaps the greatest health benefit of black tea is that it is loaded to the brim with antioxidants. These compounds eliminate harmful substances called free radicals, typically toxins and pathogens consumed by eating or drinking unsafe sources of nourishment or from smoking or consuming excessive amounts of alcohol, which are behind a wide range of health problems. Antioxidants booster the immune system, eliminate food borne illnesses, reduce the risk of certain cancers and retards the aging process.

Diabetes Fighting – Although only proven by association, black tea has been demonstrated to have some successes at reducing a person’s risk of diabetes and helping people with diabetes manage their symptoms better. It is hypothesized that black tea helps stabilize blood sugar levels.

Booster Metabolism – in addition to the caffeine in black tea that excites the metabolism, black tea has been shown to increase metabolic activity, increasing the rate at which food is turned into energy instead of stored as fat.

Lowers Stress – Black tea acts as an effective alternate medicine for treating stress as black tea is effective at reducing the stress hormone cortisol in the blood stream, limiting stress and reducing the side effects of being under stress for an extended period of time.

Prevents Cognitive Impairment – Due to a unique antioxidant present in tea that penetrates the membrane the separates the brain from the bloodstream, regular drinkers of tea are shown to have fewer cognitive impairments due to aging compared to people who are not regular tea drinkers.

Cardiovascular Health – Researchers have also found that the antioxidants in black tea have health benefits as far reaching as protecting the cardiovascular system from high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Black tea benefits may also lower the risk of a person developing heart disease.