Drinking tea is good for your health, both body and mind health. Tea is the most frequently consumed beverage around the world other than water, a $6.5 billion industry in the United States alone, according to World Tea Expo. It’s also a cultural icon with innumerable local variations. There are postprandial mint teas poured with a flourish in North Africa, milky concoctions served with scones and jam on British afternoons, energizing matés brewed in the Andes, sweet teas sipped at lunches in Savannah, Georgia. In the Middle East, serving tea to a stranger is a gesture of hospitality. In Japan, it has a formal ceremony. And the aroma of a tea can bring back a memory as surely as a photograph.

Oolong tea is party oxidized, making it more mellow than black but not as biting as green. A type of flavonoid in oolong called chafuroside may fight inflammation and help inhibit the development of intestinal cancers. White is the purest, least-processed tea, and it is fragrant and sweet. White tea is rich in EGCG, a catechin with protective effects against heart disease.

True teas are made using the leaves of the tea plant known as Camellia sinensis. These teas include green tea, white tea, oolong tea, pu-erh tea, and black tea. While these teas are made using the same leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant, the difference in color and taste arises from the production process. Green tea and white tea are the true teas, which undergo the least processing. These teas are not oxidized. The leaves are harvested and dried to prevent the chemical reaction that turns the leaves a dark brown or black color. As a result, these teas retain their natural green color and are considered among the healthiest teas.

Until recently, the millennia-old Chinese tea industry was tightly shuttered, even more than the country as a whole. Tea regions were mostly closed to foreigners. Lately, though, an outward-looking China has been marketing its cultural patrimony, and tourism to tea-growing areas is encouraged. So when I arrived in Wuyishan, a city of 224,000, for the sole purpose of drinking tea, Liu understood. He met me at the airport, then drove a long way up a narrow road to a restaurant that resembled a south Texas barbecue shack. There were rickety wooden sheds connected by planks in the overgrown grass, not your usual setting for a Rabelaisian feast.

“There’s a lot of literature out there on tea and heart health,” said Anna Ardine, clinical nutrition manager at Magee-Womens Hospital of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “This is a health effect for which there is the strongest evidence.” In fact, a study published earlier this year that combined data from a host of earlier reports found a nearly 20 percent reduction in the risk of heart attack and a 35 percent reduced risk of stroke among those who drank one to three cups of green tea a day. Those who drank four or more cups of green tea daily had a 32 percent reduction in the risk of having a heart attack and lower levels of LDL cholesterol. Four cups of green tea may keep you running to the bathroom, but you can get the same benefit from drinking one cup of matcha tea, which is made from ground green tea leaves and is said to be the nutritional equivalent of 10 cups of regular green tea.

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