Green Tea Linked to Reduced Mortality

by Christine Buske | More from this Blogger

14 Sep 2006 02:03 PM

A study with Japanese adults suggests that those people who consume larger amounts of green tea have lower risks of death. This includes cardiovascular disease, and all other causes except cancer. This is good news, considering that tea is almost as popular a beverage as water. The world consumes about three billion kilograms of tea in total, but this includes all types of tea.

Considering tea is so popular world wide, advertising these benefits could result in some significant health care savings on a global scale.

Green tea has been studied extensively in vitro and in animal studies, but the manner in which it can prevent human cardiovascular disease is still not clear.

In the study relating green tea and mortality, conducted at the Tohoku University School of Public Policy, Sendai, Japan, 40,530 adults were studied. Of these people 80% consumed green tea and more than 50% of those people drank more than three cups a day. All subjects had a personal history of coronary heart disease, stroke or cancer and they were followed for eleven years. In these eleven years just over 4200 participants passed away. Almost 900 deaths were due to cardiovascular disease and 1134 contributed to cancer. The study pointed out that green tea reduced mortality due to all causes and particularly cardiovascular diseases by 16 percent, if participants drank five or more cups of green tea a day. During the seven year follow up the mortality rate among those people decreased by 26%.

It appears that women have a bit of a benefit from green tea over men, although it had a positive effect on both sexes. However, in women there was a decreased mortality of 31% due to cardiovascular disease.

A small downside, no relationship was found between green tea and reduced cancer risk. So basically, there was no proof from this study that green tea helps to prevent cancer, but it does seem to have a significant effect on preventing cardiovascular diseases.

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