We associate nice skin with beauty because healthy skin usually signals healthy individuals.

And to be able to flaunt a nice skin, researchers say that you must drink two cups of tea daily.

A new American research shows that this amount of tea would decrease the risk of developing skin cancer. The team made a comparison between the amount of tea consumed by 1,400 patients with skin cancer and 700 subjects who had not developed the disease.

Tea chemicals had been found to induce an overall protective effect, but British cancer experts say that tea is the most effective against skin cancer.

The research made at Dartmouth Medical School, New Hampshire, surveyed two types of skin cancers: 770 subjects with basal cell carcinoma and 696 with squamous cell carcinoma, all diagnosed between 1993 and 1995 or 1997 and 2000.

Sunlight is the main factor triggering the disease in roughly 90% of cases. In UK alone, 70,000 people are affected by cancer yearly.

All the subjects, aged 25 to 74, were asked about diet, lifestyle and their intake of tea, both green and black. Both tea types contain abundant levels of antioxidants and animal tests revealed that both types impede the development of cancer cells.

People drinking tea regularly have been found by this research also to display a lower risk of both cancer types. Two or more cups daily displayed a 65% decreased risk of growing squamous cell carcinoma; the effect on basal cell carcinoma was weaker, but effective. "Adding lemon peel to the tea, a practice more common in the US than the UK, seemed to increase the benefits of the drink," the researchers said.

"The constituents of tea have been investigated for their activity against a variety of diseases and cancers. But the most potent appear to be polyphenols [antioxidants]", said lead researcher Dr Judy Rees.

Further investigation of tea chemicals could better explain how skin cancers emerge. Others ask for more research to be convinced about the truth of this hypothesis. "Although these results sound interesting they do not provide firm evidence that drinking tea offers protection against non-melanoma skin cancer," said Dr Alison Ross, science information officer at Cancer Research UK.