A prospective cohort study of half a million tea drinkers in the United Kingdom has shown that higher tea intake was associated with a modestly lower risk of death.
The study – led by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – is a large and comprehensive analysis of the potential mortality benefits of drinking black tea.
Past studies finding a modest association between higher tea intake and lower risk of death have mainly focused on Asian populations, who commonly drink green tea. Studies on black tea have yielded mixed results, according to NCI.
In the new study, the researchers found that people who consumed two or more cups of tea per day had a nine to 13 percent lower risk of death from any cause than people who did not drink tea.
Higher tea consumption was also associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease and stroke. The association was seen regardless of preferred tea temperature, the addition of milk or sugar and genetic variations affecting the rate at which people metabolize caffeine.
The findings, which appeared on Aug. 30 in Annals of Internal Medicine, suggest that black tea, even at higher levels of intake, can be part of a healthy diet, the researchers wrote.
The research involved 498,043 men and women between ages 40 and 69 who participated in the large cohort study called UK Biobank. The participants were followed for about 11 years, and death information came from a linked database from the UK National Health Service.
Maki Inoue-Choi, Ph.D., for the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at NCI, led the study, named “Tea Consumption and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality in the UK Biobank: A Prospective Cohort Study.”
NCI leads the National Cancer Program and NIH’s efforts to dramatically reduce the prevalence of cancer and improve the lives of people with cancer. NCI supports a wide range of cancer research and training extramurally through grants and contracts, and its intramural research program conducts innovative, transdisciplinary basic, translational, clinical and epidemiological research on the causes of cancer, avenues for prevention, risk prediction, early detection and treatment. NCI also conducts research at the NIH Clinical Center – the world’s largest research hospital.
To learn more, visit the NCI website at Cancer.gov. To read more on the study, see the original report at Annals of Internal Medicine here.
Reference: Inoue-Choi M, Ramirez Y, Cornelis MC, et al. “Tea Consumption and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality in the UK Biobank: A Prospective Cohort Study.” Ann. Intern. Med. August 30, 2022. DOI: 10.7326/M22-0041
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