Drinking two cups of tea a day helps you live longer, new study suggests

A new study has suggested that tea drinkers who have a least two brews a day are likely to live for longer than those who don’t drink any.

In news that will likely be music to the ears of northerners far and wide, the study also suggested tea drinkers could have healthier hearts than their non-tea drinking counterparts.

The study was conducted with a questionnaire answered from 2006 to 2010, which was then followed up over more than a decade.

Researchers from the National Institutes of Health used data from the UK Biobank, which saw 85% of the half a million men and women, aged forty to sixty-nine, report that they regularly drink tea.

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Of those, 89% said they drank black tea.

And the findings found that the positive effects of the drink appear unaffected by whether the tea is taken black, with milk or with sugar.

Read More: Pouring milk before water makes a better cup of tea, scientist claims

The temperature of the tea and the rate at which participants metabolise caffeine also didn’t seem to play a role in the health benefits.

Overall, the study found that, compared with those who do not drink tea, the regular consumption of black tea was associated with a reduction of between 9%-13% in mortality over ten years in a middle-aged, mostly white, adult general population, especially in terms of cardiovascular disease.

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However, Fernando Rodríguez Artalejo, professor of preventive medicine and public health at the Autonomous University of Madrid, said while the results represent a ‘substantial advance in the field’, they do not definitively establish that tea is the cause of the lower early mortality of tea drinkers.

He said this is because it cannot exclude that this is down to other health factors associated with tea consumption.

Another question that remains is whether people who do not drink tea should start doing so as a means to improve their health.

He said, as per Sky News: “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.”