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but that’s not the only reason to drink this ancient beverage. (See below for your chance to win your own copy of this book.) Full of scientifically-based research, Mark Ukra’s new book, The Ultimate Tea Diet: How Tea Can Boost Your Metabolism, Shrink Your Appetite, and Kick-Start Remarkable Weight Loss explains how tea fights cancer, helps you stay mentally focused, and reduces stress, among other things. Just the justification I needed to pour myself an extra cup of the beverage I’ve always loved the most, tea. Thees benefits apply to ANY tea — green, black and white teas — as long as the tea comes from one plant - the Camellia Sinenis plant. Herbal teas that do not contain leaves from this plant are called tisanes. If you have an herbal tisane you love, simply add a green/black or white tea bag to the cup to reap all the benefits of tea.

The Tea Diet gives you important how-tos for brewing tea (never boil the water) and how to use flavored teas as a substitute for many of your food cravings. There’s even a tea flavor called Dr. Tea’s Candy Bar Black Tea. He also explains how to re-use tea leaves, several times, which washes away much of the caffeine (water soluble), while maintaining all of tea’s health benefits.

You don’t like tea? Then try one of the many yummy recipes in the The Ultimate Tea Diet, like Frostea. Mr. Ukra shows you how you can use tea leaves, much like herbs, to create marinades and rubs for meat, and other foods, such as tea oatmeal, creating a dramatic boost in the food’s nutritional component.

Here are 13 more facts I’ve learned about tea’s benefits from The Ultimate Tea Diet.

1. Straight caffeine will arouse the nervous system and speed up your heart rate and an increase in calorie burn. When you drink tea, there is a protective ingredient in the tea (L-thenine) that prevent an increase in your heart rate, while still burning calories. (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1999.) This fat burning process is called thermogenesis, the biochemical process by which fat in the body is burned to produce energy.
2. Tea’s L-thenine naturally relieves stress, anxiety and tension, and activates neurotransmitters in your brain to promote a state of calm relaxation. (Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at the University College of London, January 2007.)
3. Tea contains EGCG (Epigallocatechin-3-gallate). a chemical compound that cleanses the blood of additional triglycerides before they’re deposited into the fat tissues, which gets more oxygen into your blood, and more energy.
4. EGCG reduces Insulin production, (Journal of Biological Chemistry, April 2006), a critical factor in weight loss.
5. Tea is not dehydrating. Dr. Carrie Ruxton (lead author of the 2006 European Journal of Clinical Nutrition tea-based studies) says you should fill up your water bottles with tea, as “drinking tea is actually better for you than drinking water. Water is continually replacing fluid. Tea replaces fluid and contains antioxidants…”
6. Tea drinkers, not coffee drinkers, had an increased of important disease-fighting protein on their T-Cells. Tea acts as sort of a natural vaccine that “teaches” immune cells to recognize markers on the surface of invading toxins. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003).
7. Arthritis-prone mice, when given the human equivalent of four cups of green tea a day, halved their risk of developing arthritis.
8. Tea lowers bad (LDL) cholesterol. (Archives of Internal Medicine, 2003 study.)
9. Drinking as little as a half-cup of green or oolong tea per day may lower the risk of high blood pressure by nearly 50 percent.
10. Tea’s antioxidant power is about 100 times greater than Vitamin C and twenty-fie times greater than vitamin E in protecting DNA from free radical damage — the kind that increases cancer. (University of Kansas, 1997.)
11. Women who consumed 26 ounces of green tea leaves each year (less than one cup per day) had a 39-percent reduced risk of breast cancer compared to non-drinkers.
12. A 2005 Swedish study of more than 61,000 women showed that women who consumed two or more cups of green of black tea everyday lowered their risk for ovarian cancer by 46 percent.
13. Preliminary studies have shown that tea enhances the results of some chemotherapy drugs by preventing cancerous cells from rejecting the drugs after the drugs have entered the tumor cells. Also, tea helps to minimize the side effects of these drugs.

To win your own free copy of The Ultimate Tea Diet. Simply leave a comment below stating why you’d like to read this book, and create a link back to this post (click on the post title to get the html code for this post in the address bar above. If you don’t have a blog — don’t worry about that step.) Then, using Random.org, I’ll select a winner on January 31, 2007.

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