Drinking tea may help keep the
doctor away. A new study finds that tea boosts the body's defenses
against infection and contains a substance that might be turned
into a drug to protect against disease, US researchers say. Coffee
does not have the same effect, they say.
A component in tea was found in laboratory experiments to prime
the immune system to attack invading bacteria, viruses and fungi,
according to a study in the Proceedings of the US National Academy
of Sciences released on Monday.
A second experiment, using human volunteers, showed that immune
system blood cells from tea drinkers responded five times faster
to germs than did the blood cells of coffee drinkers.
"We worked out the molecular aspects of this tea component
in the test tube and then tested it on a small number of people
to see if it actually worked in human beings," said Dr Jack
F. Bukowski, a researcher at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston
and Harvard Medical School. The results, he said, gave clear proof
that five cups of tea a day sharpened the body's disease defenses.