It’s an acquired taste.

That’s what a friend told me before I took my first sip of green tea. And you know what? He was right.

For those unfamiliar with green tea, it won’t bowl you over by its taste or even its aroma. After all, it’s tea – not exactly a drink that invigorates the taste buds.

But let me tell you something – the health benefits of green tea are so remarkable that it’s worthy of drinking even if you don’t care for its taste. It’s been scientifically proven to be an advocate in the fight against cancer by healing damaged skin (among other functions) as well as warding off the leading killer in the country today, heart disease.

But a new round of studies on green tea’s titanium-like toughness reveals it’s also rough-and-tumble against autoimmune diseases like type I diabetes and Sjogren’s syndrome.

An autoimmune disease is one where the body produces antibodies that attack the body itself (called autoantibodies). The more well-known autoimmune diseases include psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, Graves’ disease, endometriosis and perhaps the most common autoimmune disease, type I diabetes.

Most of us know what type I diabetes is – where the body produces an insufficient amount of insulin, rendering the body incapable of turning sugar into glucose for energy – but few have heard of Sjogren’s syndrome. Sjogren’s syndrome is a disease that affects the body’s ability to produce moisture. It attacks the glands of the body that produce tears, making the eyes abnormally dry, often causing abrasions to form around the eye. It also affects the salivary glands, leading to severe mouth dryness, sores forming around the mouth, and a host of dental problems like tooth decay and gum disease. The cause of this mysterious disease remains unknown, so too does its cure, but there are a variety of treatments.

One such treatment, at least according to researchers from the Medical College of Georgia, is green tea. They discovered this after feeding rats with symptoms similar to type I diabetes and Sjogren’s syndrome either water or water supplemented with EGCG, the antioxidant in green tea that’s linked to so many health benefits.

After 16 weeks, the rats fed the water with the EGCG were almost six and a half times more likely not to be diagnosed with diabetes. That rate dropped to about four and a half by 22 weeks. So at the very least, this suggests that green tea delays the onset of type I diabetes and Sjogren’s syndrome, a disease that affects women far more frequently than men (90 percent of Sjogren’s diagnoses are women).

Before the researchers can say definitively that green tea prevents or delays type I diabetes, they want to see if the lab results translate to people with Sjogren’s syndrome and/or type I diabetes. There shouldn’t be any problem in doing this relatively quickly, for as the researchers themselves say, EGCG is entirely natural, thus eliminating the risk of side-effects that often accompanies human-based studies.

With green tea’s stellar track record well established, I have no doubt the results will translate to humans, furthering my plea to start drinking green tea for a healthier, more resilient you today, tomorrow, and beyond.