Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss by Drinking Tea

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While doing research for my mental fitness blog, I read the outstanding book 100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss.  If you’re the least bit invested in the health of your brain, I strongly urge you to buy and read this great book.

As I read along the 100 things we can do to keep our brains healthy, I made mental notes of things I need to start doing, things I normally do, and things I’m ALL OVER.  A few things I”m ALL OVER are:

• Eating plenty of fruits and vegetables
• Walking each day
• Drinking coffee
• Drinking tea

Truth be told, with the amount of coffee and tea I drink, I did a little happy dance when I saw that each of these personal obsessions made the coveted list.  Since this is a tea blog, I’ll focus on the brain health benefits of tea.

Researchers at UCLA round that if you drink at least three cups of green or black tea a day, your likelihood of having a stroke drops by 21 percent.  If you double this (6 cups or more daily), your stroke probability falls 42 percent.   Who wouldn’t drink all the tea they possibly could with findings like these?!

But there’s more.

Evidence suggests that tea stalls the cognitive loss that precedes Alzheimer’s dementia and that the more tea you drink, the sharper your aging memory is.  As you probably already know, tea’s superpowers lie in the leaves.  Tea leaves are packed with compounds that penetrate the blood-brain barrier and block neuronal damage.

From 100 Simple Things You Can Do to Prevent Alzheimer’s and Age-Related Memory Loss: Lab rats raised on green tea, for example, have less damage in the hippocampus, or memory processing region of the brain, and consequently have vastly superior memories and learning abilities in old age.

One particularly powerful green tea antioxidant, EGCG, can block the toxicity of beta-amyloid, which kills brain cells, and remove, or “chelate,” destructive iron from the brain. In ground-breaking experiments, Israeli scientists found that EGCG can even revive sick and dying neurons thought lost to degenerative brain disease. Bringing back withered brain cells from the brink of death to robust life is a big-time help for anybody’s brain. – Page 256

The book also recommends readers either drink soft drinks and diet soft drinks once a month or not at all.  Basically, we have a choice:

1. Drink soft drinks and diet soft drinks which not only give us ZERO nutritional value but put things into our bodies that experts say are harmful
2. Drink tea instead of soft drinks and diet soft drinks and receive the health benefits to our bodies and minds.

The choice is as clear as filtered water, and now I’m going to celebrate tea’s goodness with a fresh pot of green tea.