Drink Tea to Increase Your Lifespan: Study

A Study explains why tea is better than your cuppa coffee.

Drinking tea and coffee very often is known to have certain negative impacts on health. But a recent research discovered that flavonoids, the anti-oxidants in tea help ward off the risk of dying early from various conditions apart from heart problems. The experts from the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou in Paris looked at over 130,000 participants aged between 18 and 95 to study the effects of drinking tea and coffee frequently.

After seven years of follow-up, almost 95 people succumbed to heart diseases and 625 died from other illnesses. The risk rate for heart diseases was extremely high among cigarette smokers and coffee lovers who made up 57 percent of those who drank minimum of four cups of coffee in a day.

In addition, 45 percent of those who never drank coffee reportedly indulged in physical activity compared to 41 percent of coffee drinkers. On the other hand, intake of tea controlled blood pressure levels and lowered risk of premature deaths by 25 percent.

"Overall we tend to have a higher cardiovascular risk profile for coffee drinkers and a lower risk profile for tea drinkers. We also found big gender differences," said Nicolas Danchin, study author from the Hôpital Européen Georges Pompidou, reports the Daily Mail.

"Men tend to drink coffee much more than women, while women tend to drink more tea than men.' There was a trend for tea drinking to lower cardiovascular deaths but the effect was not statistically significant after adjusting for age, gender and smoking," he adds.

However, the researchers did not note down what type of tea imparted these benefits and if adding milk was advisable. They noticed the beverage had moderate effects on non-smokers and highest impacts on ex-smokers in allaying deaths caused from heart conditions.