A cup of tea can soothe your spirit, but drinking a couple of cups each day may also lower your chances of dying early, new research suggests.
In the study of nearly 500,000 men and women who took part in the U.K. Biobank, researchers found that compared with people who didn’t drink tea, those who drank two or more cups a day lowered their risk of dying by 9 to 13 percent. And it made no difference if they took milk and sugar with their tea, or also drank coffee.
These results suggest that black tea, even at higher levels of intake, can be part of a healthy diet. Yet, “while these findings may offer reassurance to tea drinkers, they do not indicate that people should start drinking tea or increase their tea consumption for health benefits,” lead researcher Maki Inoue-Choi said during a recent media briefing by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. She’s a staff scientist in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the U.S. National Cancer Institute….