Drinking Tea Can Reduce the Risk of Dying Early

We've got some excellent news for tea drinkers! According to a study presented at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), drinking tea can reduce the risk of dying early from causes unrelated to the heart by almost 24 per cent. (More: Why drinking tea is good for you)Researchers investigated the effects of coffee and tea on cardiovascular (CV) mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at low risk of cardiovascular diseases. The study involved 131,401 people aged 18 to 95 years who had a health check up at the Paris IPC Preventive Medicine Center between January 2001 and December 2008. There were 95 deaths from cardiovascular (CV) and 632 deaths from non-CV causes. Coffee or tea consumption was assessed by a self-administered questionnaire classified as: none, one to four, or more than 4 cups per day. The researchers found that coffee drinkers had a higher cardiovascular risk profile than non-drinkers, particularly for smoking, with 57 per cent of those drinking more than four cups per day being smokers.Non-coffee drinkers were more physically active, with 45 per cent having a good level of physical activity compared to 41 per cent of the heavy coffee drinkers. The percentage of current smokers was 17 per cent for non-drinkers compared with 31 per cent in those who drank 1 to 4 cups per day and 57 per cent in those who drank more than 4 cups per day. Tea drinkers had the reverse profile of coffee drinkers, with consumers having a better CV risk profile than non-consumers. One-third (34 per cent) of the non-drinkers of tea were current smokers compared to 24 per cent of those who drank 1-4 cups per day and 29 per cent of those who drank more than 4 cups.Nicolas Danchin, researcher and professor from France said, "Overall we tend to have a higher risk profile for coffee drinkers and a lower risk profile for tea drinkers. We also found big differences with gender. Men tend to drink coffee much more than women, while women tend to drink more tea than men." Researchers added, "There was a trend for tea drinking to decrease CV mortality but the effect was not quite significant after adjusting for age, gender and smoking. But tea significantly lowered the risk of non-CV death."Danchin concluded by saying that "Tea drinking lowered the risk of non-CV death by 24 per cent and the trend towards lowering CV mortality was nearly significant." With inputs from PTI