Evidence is mounting that black, green, and oolong tea have important health benefits.

While tea drinking is embellished with great ceremony in such places as Japan, China and Great Britain, in the more hurrying culture of the U.S., tea is viewed as just another beverage. Americans drink 85 percent of their tea iced. And the brew is much less popular than soft drinks, beer, coffee, milk, fruit beverages, or bottled water.

Yet drinking tea-hot or iced-may be an easy, pleasurable way to get some serious health benefits. A number of recent studies add support to earlier findings about the benefits of tea and reveal some possible new ones. The evidence for those benefits is strongest for green tea, mainly because the green brew has been studied more than the others.

Stronger bones? Tea drinking may increase bone-mineral density and so, theoretically, could protect against osteoporosis. Two recent studies from China and Great Britain report higher bone-density measurements among tea drinkers. The Chinese study, which included over 1,000 participants age 30 and over, found that those adults who had been drinking tea regularly for 6 to 10 years had higher lumbar-spine bone-mineral density than those who didn't partake of the brew. Those who had been regular tea drinkers for more than 10 years had the highest bone density in all sites measured. Most of the tea drinkers in this study drank green or oolong tea, but some did drink black tea. Interestingly, the key variable was how long tea drinkers had been consuming tea, not how much or what type they drank each day. Additionally, in a study of more than 1,200 British women over age 65, current tea drinkers-whether they sipped one cup or more than six cups a day-had higher bone-density measurements than non-tea drinkers.

Healthier heart? Dutch researchers reported in May that tea drinkers had a substantially lower risk of heart attack-particularly fatal ones-than those who don't drink tea. That study included nearly 5,000 adults age 55 and older. Those participants who drank over 11 ounces of black tea daily had about half the risk of heart attack and less than one-third the risk of fatal heart attack compared with nondrinkers. Another study, also published in May, this one from the Harvard School of Public Health, looked at patient-survival rates after a heart attack. The more tea that patients drank in the year before their heart attack, the better their chances of surviving in the years after. Participants were divided into moderate drinkers (fewer than 14 cups per week), heavy drinkers (14 or more cups weekly), and nondrinkers. Moderate drinkers had a 28 percent lower death rate after heart attack than nondrinkers, and heavy drinkers had a 44 percent lower death rate than those who didn't drink tea. Those results held up after researchers adjusted for such factors as age, smoking, obesity, and hypertension.