How Tea Can Improve Your Brain Function

How tea may help the brain 

Tea has been soaring in popularity, particularly among those looking to improve metabolism or anyone wanting a java-free caffeine kick. Meanwhile, researchers have been exploring the possible advantages of tea to mental health and cognition.

While the word"tea" can be widely applied to an infusion of herbs, fruit, flowers, or leaves, for the purposes of this article, we're going to focus on authentic tea, from the Camellia sinensis plant. Tea contains many plant polyphenols, catechins, antioxidants, and other phytochemicals, while they're generally connected with boosting metabolism and warding off cancer, in fact, they might be just as beneficial for the brain and cognitive health.

Benefits Of Caffeine

Caffeine is probably the best-known brain-booster found in tea. It has effects are immediate: increased alertness, wakefulness, and attention. But caffeine is a stimulant whose effects subside fairly quickly.

Uniquely, tea includes the amino acid L-Theanine that's much more calming -- it relaxes without causing drowsiness. Caffeine and L-Theanine are a naturally-occurring pair found just in tea, which explains precisely why tea has become the beverage of choice for monks requiring focus and concentration when settling into a long meditation.

Consuming this blend of caffeine and L-Theanine (in extract form) has been proven to help decrease mental fatigue while improving response time and working memory. When taken over time (e.g., 16 months ) this combination also helped with advancements in both memory and cognitive alertness.

But of course, caffeine and L-Theanine aren't the only chemicals present in tea which can enhance brain function -- various catechins exert a favorable influence, too. Some preliminary evidence even suggests drinking tea may reduce the chance of dementia.

One specific tea catechin, known as Theogallin, was tested together with L-Theanine and has been found to be cognitive enhancing an anti-depressive. Significantly, another study looked at the L-Theanine and Theogallin combination (also without caffeine), but this period on humans, also discovered that attention enhanced.

Daily ingestion of green tea helped to maintain the health of the cerebral cortex component of the brain in rats that are senile, according to the research one meta-study outlined the effects of consuming tea like this: "Caffeinated tea, even when ingested at fixed intervals, can maintain alertness, concentrated attention, and precision and might modulate the acute effects of higher doses of caffeine."

Caffeine and L-Theanine are the most effective vitamins for the brain.

So, how does all this study apply for you?

If you want to get focused, attentive, have a quick response time, maintain short-term memory, correctly process information, and want to be in a fantastic mood, then elect for a few cups of tea.

If, within the course of your life, you want to keep cognitive functioning and memory, prevent a decline in brain function, also prevent memory reduction, then drink tea frequently throughout your lifetime. This may be particularly helpful when you've got metabolic-related issues (such as Type-II Diabetes).

Although I drink tea frequently because I love it, occasionally I have an excess cup or two when I need to be very focused, think clearly, or write a good deal.