A few cups of tea a day might help to stave off an early death, a U.K. Biobank prospective cohort study showed.
Among nearly half a million middle-age adults, those who consumed two or more cups of tea a day saw a modest but lower risk for all-cause mortality over a median 11.2-year follow-up, reported Maki Inoue-Choi, PhD, of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
While those who only drank one or fewer cups per day didn’t see this protective benefit (HR 0.95, 95% CI 0.91-1.00), moderate and heavy tea drinkers did see a significantly lower mortality risk:
- Two to three cups per day: HR 0.87 (95% CI 0.84-0.91)
- Four to five cups: HR 0.88 (95% CI 0.84-0.91)
- Six to seven cups: HR 0.88 (95% CI 0.84-0.92)
- Eight to nine cups: HR 0.91 (95% CI 0.86-0.97)
- 10 or more cups: HR 0.89 (95% CI 0.84-0.95)
“Almost 90% drank black tea, making black tea the predominant tea type in this population,” Inoue-Choi pointed out during a press conference. She added that most previous research quantifying the benefits of tea drinking have focused on green, not black, tea.
“These results suggest that black tea, even at higher levels of intake, can be part of a healthy diet,” she said. “While these findings offer reassurance to tea drinkers, they do not indicate that people should start drinking tea or change their tea consumption for health benefits.”
Inoue-Choi’s group also found that drinking tea was linked with a lower risk for cardiovascular-specific causes of death.
In fully adjusted models for soci