Drinking Tea Lowers Non-Cardiovascular Mortality by 24 Percent

It is now official that drinking tea dramatically lowers non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent.

In the United States, where people are addicted to latte, tea is gaining ground as scientists learn more about its benefits. Tea, apart from being the much loved beverage, is known to carry a number of health benefits. Studies conducted in the past have highlighted that tea - world's second most-consumed beverage - helps prevent cardiovascular diseases and some types of cancer.

The new study, led by the European Society of Cardiology reveals that tea consumption reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent. They based their finding on the evaluation of 131,401 people aged between 18-95 years who underwent a health check up at the Paros IPC Preventive Medicine Center, between 2001 and 2008.

The subjects were followed for 3.5 years, during which 95 deaths from CV and 632 deaths from non-CV cases were reported. The researchers assessed the subjects' consumption of coffee or tea by a self-administered questionnaire that was further classified into three types mainly 'none', '1-4', or more than 4 cups per day.

Professor Nicolas Danchin from France said: "If you have to choose between tea or coffee it's probably better to drink tea. Coffee and tea are important components of our way of life. Their effects on cardiovascular (CV) health have been investigated in the past with sometimes divergent results. We investigated the effects of coffee and tea on CV mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at low risk of cardiovascular diseases."

When compared to non-coffee drinkers, coffee drinkers have greater CV risk profile, especially for smokers. Among non-drinkers, the percentage of current smokers was 17 percent as compared to 31 percent among those who drank 1-4 cups per days and 57 percent among those who consumed more than 4 cups per day.

They also noticed that non-coffee drinkers were physically more active. Nearly 45 percent had good level of physical activity when compared to 41 percent of heavy coffee drinkers. Also, the heavy coffee drinkers were older than the non-coffee drinkers. There was a minimal difference in blood pressure with heavy coffee drinkers having lower systolic blood pressure and higher diastolic blood pressure when compared to non-drinkers.

The reverse of this was seen in tea drinkers. When compared to those who do not consume tea, tea drinkers had a better CV risk profile than the non-consumers. Nearly 3 percent of those who do not consume tea were current smokers when compared to 24 percent of them who drank 1-4 cups per day and 29 percent of them who drank more than 4 cups.

As the number of tea cups consumed per day increased, the level of physical activity also increased from 43 percent in moderate tea drinkers to 46 percent in heavy tea drinkers. When compared to coffee, tea had a significant effect on blood pressure with a 4-5 mmHg drop in the systolic blood pressure and a 3 mmHg drop in the diastolic blood pressure.