A new research study has claimed that drinking four or more cups of tea throughout the day could lower your risk of type 2 diabetes.
The findings have suggested that drinking black, green, or oolong tea daily was linked to a 17 per cent lower risk of diabetes. This percentage was predicted over an average of a decade.
Drinking between one and three mugs of the good stuff a day cuts the risk by four per cent, according to the research. Presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Stockholm, these findings are based on a review of 19 studies involving over one million people.
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The research is yet to be peer-reviewed or published in any journals. Lead author Xiaying Li, from Wuhan University of Science and Technology in China, said: “Our results are exciting because they suggest that people can do something as simple as drinking four cups of tea a day to potentially lessen their risk of developing type 2 diabetes.”
Research in previous years has found that tea may have benefits to health, due to the fact that it contains antioxidants and polyphenols, which may protect against disease. However, in order to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, experts are in agreement that people should focus on their weight.
Obesity is a major factor in developing type 2 diabetes. It accounts for 80 to 85 per cent of the risk of developing the condition.
People who are severely overweight are thought to be up to 80 times more likely to develop diabetes than those who have a body mass index of under 22.
The new study, performed in China, researchers first explored data from 5,199 adults in the China Health and Nutrition Survey who did not have diabetes, who were recruited in 1997 and followed until 2009.
Those in the study filled in a food and drink frequency questionnaire, and provided information on their lifestyle, such as smoking, exercising, and alcohol consumption.
However, this research found no stand-out benefit from drinking tea and the risk of diabetes. Yet, when the researchers did a systematic review of studies all the way up to September 2021 from eight different countries, findings differed.
This analysis suggested that each cup of tea per day reduced the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by around one per cent. The findings noted that regardless of what type of tea people drank, what their gender was, and where they were from, the benefits were there to see.
Xiaying Li explained that tea has been shown to reduce risk, but only when consumed in larger quantities. She added: "It is possible that particular components in tea, such as polyphenols, may reduce blood glucose levels, but a sufficient amount of these bioactive compounds may be needed to be effective.
“It may also explain why we did not find an association between tea drinking and type 2 diabetes in our cohort study, because we did not look at higher tea consumption.”
So, when it comes to whether the reduced risks were true if people added milk to their tea, the researchers said they had reviewed literature previously published on the issue.
They noted that "dairy and dairy products were associated with a reduced risk of diabetes."
Naveed Sattar, professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow, said: “Given the nature of this study, it cannot prove tea prevents diabetes per se.
“Rather it could be that people who drink more tea avoid or less often drink more harmful sugary drinks or equivalent or that they have other health behaviours that leads them to have lower risks of type 2 diabetes.
“There is no good trial evidence whatsoever that the chemicals in tea prevent diabetes, so I suspect it’s more about tea being healthier (less calorific) than many alternative drinks or tea drinkers leading healthier lives more generally.”
Matt Sydes, professor of clinical trials and methodology at the Medical Research Council’s clinical trials unit, said: “This is large, observational data. It’s not a randomised controlled trial so there’s plenty of room for data to be misunderstood.
“Importantly, everyone drinks fluids. If there is an effect here (and that’s a big if), it might be not about the tea they drink, but about what they don’t drink because they are drinking tea at those moments.
“One can’t tell at the moment.”
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