January is National Tea month.

Here are a few health conscious reasons you should add a cup of tea to your daily routine.

1. Tea has less caffeine than coffee. While there are some potential health benefits to consuming moderate amounts of caffeine, drinking loads of it is hard on your heart and other organs. Tea can provide the pick me up of coffee but without the high levels of caffeine making you less jittery and helping you get to sleep when you want.
2. Tea helps keep you hydrated. Conventional wisdom held that caffeinated beverages actually dehydrated you more than they hydrated you. Recent research has shown, however, that caffeine doesn’t make a difference unless you consume more than 5 to 6 cups at a time. Tea has been shown to actually be more healthy for you than water alone in some cases because it hydrates while providing antioxidants.
3. Tea lowers the chance of having cognitive impairment. Research on Japanese adults who consumed at least 2 cups of green tea daily found that those individuals had cut their risk of cognitive impairment by half.
4. Tea can cause a temporary increase in short term memory. Not feeling on your game today? Try drinking some tea. The caffeine it contains may give you the boost you need to improve your memory, at least for a few hours.
5. Tea may protect against heart disease. While more studies are needed for conclusive evidence, it has been suggested that regular consumption of green and black tea leads to a significant reduction in the risk of heart disease related heart attacks.
6. Tea can help lower cholesterol.A recent study in China has shown that the combination of a low-fat diet and tea produced on average a 16% drop in bad cholesterol over 12 weeks when compared to a control group simply on a low-fat diet. If you’re struggling to get your cholesterol under control, try adding tea to your diet to see if it helps.
7. Tea can help lower blood pressure. Drinking only half a cup of green or oolong tea a day could reduce your risk of high blood pressure by up to 50% and those that drink more can even further reduce their risk, even if they have additional risk factors.
8. Tea increases your metabolism. Is a slow metabolic rate keeping you from losing the weight you want? Some studies suggest that green tea may be able to boost your metabolic rate slightly, allowing you to burn an additional 70-80 calories a day. While this may not seem like much, over time it could add up.
9. Tea helps keep your skin acne-free. The antioxidants in green tea may have an effect on acne, and in some cases have been shown to work as well as a 4% solution of the much more harsh benzoyl peroxide.
10. Tea protects against cancer. While the exact types of cancer tea protects against are debated, recent research has suggested that lung, prostate and breast cancer see the biggest drop when green tea is consumed regularly. Again, there is no surefire way to prevent getting cancer, but having a cup of tea a day may is definitely worth the preventative benefits.
11. Tea can help prevent arthritis. Research suggests that older women who are tea drinkers are 60 percent less likely to develop rheumatoid arthritis than those who do not drink tea. The same effect has not been measured in older males, however, but additional studies may prove otherwise.
12. Tea can help fight the flu. Black tea may bolster your efforts to fight the flu as participants in a study who gargled with a black tea extract solution twice daily where more immune to the flu virus than those who didn’t.

So grab a cup and warm up.