Tea may help fight infections

A wee cuppa 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, 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 National Academy of Sciences released last week.

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, Bukowski said, gave clear proof that five cups of tea a day sharpened the body’s disease defenses.

Penny Kris-Etherton, a nutrition expert at Penn State University, said Bukowski’s study adds to a growing body of evidence that tea is an effective disease fighter.

“This is potentially a very significant finding,” she said. “We’re seeing multiple benefits from tea.”

But she said the work needs to be confirmed in a much larger study, involving more people.