Drinking dark tea every day may help to mitigate type 2 diabetes risk and progression in adults through better blood sugar control, suggests new research at this year’s Annual Meeting of The European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD), Hamburg (2-6 Oct).
The study, by researchers from the University of Adelaide in Australia and Southeast University in China, found that compared with never tea drinkers, daily consumers of dark tea had 53% lower risk for prediabetes and 47% reduced risk for type 2 diabetes, even after taking into account established risk factors known to drive the risk for diabetes, including age, gender, ethnicity, body mass index (BMI), average arterial blood pressure, fasting plasma glucose, cholesterol, alcohol intake, smoking status, family history of diabetes and regular exercise.
“The substantial health benefits of tea, including a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes, have been reported in several studies over recent years, but the mechanisms underlying these benefits have been unclear”, notes the study’s co-lead author Associate Professor Tongzhi Wu from the University of Adelaide and The Hospital Research Foundation Group Mid-Career Fellow.
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I would be very surprised if this effect was exclusive to oxidized leaves as the title seems to imply, if the effect is real it is far more likely that all tea brewed from tea leaves will have this property. In fact I recall similar attributions to puerh, though i suspect that was more folklore than actual acience or medicine.
Agreed, there have already been studies regarding green tea helping with blood glucose and fat management. Black tea having the same benefits isn’t that surprising.
Actually, upon closer attention, the article is in fact talking about fermented tea, so likely Pu-Erh. Dark tea is used to refer to fermented tea apparently, and is not the same as black tea.