I have touched upon the many health benefits of drinking tea, but one I hadn’t come across was how tea drinking can affect cholesterol levels as well as overall heart health.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States and accounts for over 800,000 deaths per year.  This is about 1 in every 3 deaths.   So the possibility that drinking tea could improve those statistics should be very intriguing.

This article from University Health News cites a number of studies linking tea consumption with improved cholesterol numbers as well as other markers for heart health.  One study compared a group that drank black tea three times a day to a group that drank the same amount of hot water.  The tea drinking group showed significant reductions in triglyceride levels (35.8% in men and 28.6% in women) and improvements in LDL/HDL cholesterol ratio (16.6%).  Another study study suggests that tea drinking may inhibit the absorption of fat in the intestines which was the possible reason it found that regular tea drinking inhibited weight gain and reduced both waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio.