Tea leads a double life. For Americans, it's long been a cheap, convenient drink that's both soothing and stimulating -- nothing more. Yet there's another reason people the world over drink more tea than any other beverage: The lowly tea leaf has potent health-enhancing powers. The Chinese have known this for some four thousand years; finally, modern research is catching up.

Black and green teas are loaded with flavonoids called polyphenols. Polyphenols act as antioxidants, helping to prevent the free-radical cell damage that leads to cancer, high cholesterol, heart disease, and other serious afflictions.

Researchers studying thirty-nine different antioxidants in foods have found that the polyphenols found in tea are the most potent free-radical fighters of all.

Tea has been shown to reduce tumor formation and is linked to lower levels of skin, breast, lung, esophageal, pancreatic, colon, liver, small intestine, and stomach cancer.

In a study of eight hundred men, those who ate the most flavonoids, including polyphenols, had a 58 percent lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who ate the least. And the healthiest men were those who got more than half their flavonoids from about four cups of black tea a day.

Tips: Steep tea for three minutes to get all the beneficial compounds. Steeping longer will produce more compounds, but it also makes them bitter.

Opt for tea bags rather than loose tea: Tea in bags has more polyphenol.

Both green and black teas (regular and decaffeinated) contain health-promoting substances; so do bottled iced tea and powdered tea mixes. But herbal tea doesn't contain leaves from the tea plant, Camellia sinesis, so it shares none of the benefits of the others.

Many people think that if certain foods are good, a lot is better.
This is not always the case, and high doses of certain food are actually toxic.

Read about the healthy food, research the vitamins and minerals and check with your health care provider if you are unsure about how much to eat and how much may be too much.