Tea is good for the heart—just as long as it’s not too hot

Tea is good for our heart—but you need to drink a lot of it, and when it’s not piping hot.

Drinking six to eight cups a day can lower your risk of heart disease by around 11 percent, but the best effects were from black tea—and not green, as earlier studies have suggested—and when it had cooled, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Beijing discovered.

They tracked the heart health and tea drinking of 485,934 Chinese for around nine years, during which time 14,863 of them developed several types of vascular disease, including cardiovascular disease, which affects the heart and blood vessels, and cerebrovascular disease, which involves blood vessels that supply the brain.

Those who drank six to eight cups of tea a day had an 11 percent lower risk of developing vascular disease compared to those who drank little or no tea.  Black tea drinkers had greater protection than those who drank green tea, and this may be down to the way the teas are processed.  Black tea is typically allowed to undergo extensive oxidation, a chemical process that changes the composition of compounds in the leaves, while green tea is processed to limit oxidation.

Surprisingly, those benefits disappeared if people were drinking their tea when it was ‘piping hot’—and it even increased the risk.  Only those who drank their tea when it had cooled enjoyed heart-health benefits.

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