Tea Blog

Tea is good for you. Now that’s a pretty blunt statement but – as you may have noticed if you’ve been reading some of the articles published in these pages lately – there have been a number of studies released over the past decade or so to support this assertion.

One of the more noteworthy of these studies – at least if you judge these things merely by size and scope – is the so-called ww, a Japanese project more properly known as the Ohsaki National Health Insurance Cohort Study. In this study, which got underway in 1994, Japanese researchers looked at the effects of green tea consumption on 40,530 Japanese adults who previously had no history of stroke, coronary heart disease, or cancer.

The objective of the research was to investigate the associations between green tea consumption and all-cause and cause-specific mortality, specifically with respect to cardiovascular disease and cancer. Results were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2006.

Participants of the study were followed up for up to 11 years (1995-2005) for all-cause mortality and for up to 7 years (1995-2001) for cause-specific mortality.

Over 11 years of follow-up, 4209 participants died, and over 7 years of follow-up, 892 participants died of cardiovascular disease and 1134 participants died of cancer. Green tea consumption was inversely associated with mortality due to all causes and due to cardiovascular disease.

While other research has found that the high antioxidant levels in green tea helped to reduce tumors, the Japanese study found no clear connection between tea consumption and lower death rates from cancer. The researchers did discover, however, that people who drink green tea are less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, particularly stroke.

For more information on The Ohsaki Study, refer to this abstract from the Journal of the American Medical Association.