There’s nothing quite like a soothing cuppa, sometimes multiple times per day – not just for our nerves, but if one study is to be believed, for our health as well.
Conducted by researchers at the US National Cancer Institute (part of the National Institutes of Health), the study, which appears in Annals of Internal Medicine, examined UK Biobank data from almost 500,000 people aged between 40 to 69 over 11 years, 85 per cent of whom said they were regular tea-drinkers; 89 per cent of these said black tea was their brew of choice.
The study found that drinking two or more cups of black tea per day was associated with a nine per cent to 13 per cent lower risk of mortality from all causes than drinking no tea at all.
Cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, and stroke risk were all lower among the tea-drinkers – and this association persisted no matter what temperature the tea-lovers enjoyed their cuppas, whether they added milk or sugar, and whether or not they had any genetic variations affecting how quickly they metabolised caffeine.
As reported in The Guardian, according to public health and preventive medicine expert Professor Fernando Rodriguez Artalejo of the Autonomous University of Madrid, this study is a “substantial advance” when it comes to health benefits of tea, as most prior studies had been conducted in Asia, where green tea is more popular than black.
“This article shows that regular consumption of black tea (the most widely consumed tea in Europe) is associated with a modest reduction in total and, especially, cardiovascular disease mortality over 10 years in a middle-aged, mostly white, adult general population,” he said.
While Prof. Artalejo does stress that the tea itself has not been conclusively proven as the source of these health benefits – given other factors associated with tea-drinking may have had an impact – if you’ll excuse us, we might go break out the Twinings, just in case.
