Good news for tea lovers: Several recent studies have suggested that drinking several cups of tea per day could lower the risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
Li and colleagues reviewed 19 studies, which included more than 1 million adults across 8 countries. They found that the benefits of drinking
went up as someone drank more cups. For one to three cups per day, for instance, the risk of type 2 diabetes dropped by 4%. The percentages increased from there.published last month, researchers found that drinking two or more cups of black tea per day lowered the overall risk of death by 9% to 13% among 498,000 people in the U.K. during a 14-year period, as compared with those who drank no tea.
“We think our findings will be very reassuring to people who are already drinking tea,” Maki Inoue-Choi, PhD, a staff scientist at the National Cancer Institute, told NBC News. Even among those who drank more than 10 cups of tea per day, “we didn’t see any negative effects on mortality risk,” she said.
The health benefits could stem from the polyphenols in tea, which are natural compounds in plants that provide