Tea for the Heart

The question is tea good for the heart has been around since many centuries and much scientific research has been done on this subject especially since the early 1990’s. The health benefits of Tea for the heart are thought to be derived from ingredients known as "flavanoids", a type of antioxidant found in all types of tea.
This antioxidant acts as a neutralizing agent of "free radicals", a highly reactive molecule which travels around the body causing chemical reactions which can damage cells, including those in the heart tissues. Free radicals are directly linked to heart disease, stroke, cancer and aging.

People consuming at least one cup of tea a day may reduce their risk of heart attack by almost 50%, a study found. The American research program looked at tea and coffee drinking habits of almsot 700 people. The men and women who drank one or more cups of tea a day had a 44% reduction in heart attack risk compared to non tea drinkers. Other studies have produced much the same reuslts.
Already in the late 1960’s, American scientists noticed some interesting findings. While doing autopsies, they observed that the arteries of tea drinking Chinese Americans had only two thirds as much coronary artery disease as Caucasian coffee drinkers. Since then, many more studies have shown a link between drinking tea and preventing heart disease.
In 2003, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a study in which, over a twelve-week period, 240 Chinese men and women with moderately high cholesterol were given either a green tea extract augmented with flavanoids from black tea or a placebo with no tea. After the twelve weeks, the placebo group had no changes in their total cholesterol or their “bad” LDL cholesterol levels. In the tea group, however, total cholesterol dropped by 11.3 percent and LDL by 16.4 percent. At the same time, the “good” HDL cholesterol levels increased by 2.3 percent in the tea-drinking group, while the placebo group saw an increase of only 0.7 percent.

Tea also protects the heart by helping to lower blood pressure. Hypertension, or high blood pressure, is the most common form of heart disease, and is a major risk factor for heart-related death. A study of Chinese tea drinkers published in 2004 showed that drinking as little as a half-cup of green or oolong tea per day may lower the risk of high blood pressure by nearly 50 percent. Researchers found that men and women who drank tea on a daily basis for at least a year were much less likely to develop hypertension than those who didn’t, and the more tea they drank, the bigger the benefits. Those who drank at least a half-cup of moderate strength green or oolong tea per day for a year had a 46-percent lower risk of developing hypertension than those who didn’t drink tea. Among those who drank more than two and a half cups of tea per day, the risk of high blood pressure was reduced by 65 percent.
As you can see it may be in everybody’s interest to have a delicious cup of tea daily, not only for the joy of it but its health benefits.