In China, from Tang Dynasty to Qing Dynasty (618-1911 A.D.), there had existed a great number of books contributed to tea. Those included mainly 3 categories, namely books in herbal medicines, tea manuals and general historic publications.
Tea was repeated to exhibit 24 kinds of physiological and therapeutic effects, such as causing less sleep, calming down, clearing sight, relieving headache, dispelling thirst, dissipating fever, detoxification, helping digestion, reducing obesity, diuresis, as a pectoral for chest disease, invigorating, strengthening teeth, and more.
In addition to the probable applications as medicine, tea, used as a daily beverage has made great contributions to human health in at least two major aspects.Firstly, tea drinking changes the habit of how people consume water.
In ancient times, when people felt thirsty they would simply drink natural, unprocessed water that might contain pathogenic microbes.
Since the adoption of tea drinking, people had used boiling water to make tea infusion. In fact this practice helped people avoid a variety of infectious disease.
Secondly tea appears to be a good substitute for alcoholic beverages. This people who very much enjoyed tea drinking might avoid alcohol over consumption that causes severe damage to the human body.
Physiological and Therapeutic Effects of Tea
