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Study: Drinking at least two cups of tea helps you live longer
A study of the UK national health database has revealed, Britons who say they drink at least two cups of tea per day tend to live longer than those who don’t.
Scientists, the RT said, analyzed nearly 500,000 people aged between 40 and 68 who are included in the UK Biobank, a database meant to help explore possible links between various medical conditions and genetic or environmental factors affecting patients.
The paper, which was published in the medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine on Tuesday (August 30), sought to discover whether there was any correlation between tea-drinking habits and mortality.
It found that compared with those who do not drink tea, the regular consumption of black tea (the most widely consumed tea in Europe) was associated with a modest reduction of between 9% and 13% in mortality over 10 years in a middle-aged, mostly white, adult general population, especially in terms of cardiovascular disease, the Sky news said.
Fernando Rodríguez Artalejo, professor of preventive medicine and public health at the Autonomous University of Madrid, described the research as representing "a substantial advance in the field."
He said most studies had been done in Asia, where green tea is the most widely consumed, and the few outside Asia were "small in size and inconclusive in their results".
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He said the study does not definitively establish that tea is the cause of the lower early mortality of tea drinkers, because it cannot exclude that this is down to other health factors associated with tea consumption.
The report said, the trend was similar regardless of whether participants drank coffee or how well their genes allowed them to metabolize caffeine.
The study does not imply causation, only correlation, and did not account for factors not reflected in the database, such as the size of the cups consumed.
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Another question which remains unanswered is whether people who do not drink tea should start doing so to improve their health.
He said: "Studies should be done with repeated measurements of tea consumption over time and compare the mortality of those who do not consume tea on a sustained basis with that of those who have started to consume tea or have increased their consumption over time, and those who have been drinking tea for years."
