Sep 01, 2014 12:50 PM EDT By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

Drinking tea reduces non-cardiovascular death by 24 percent, according to a recent study.

"If you have to choose between tea or coffee it's probably better to drink tea. Coffee and tea are important components of our way of life," researcher Nicolas Danchin said in a statement. "Their effects on cardiovascular (CV) health have been investigated in the past with sometimes divergent results. We investigated the effects of coffee and tea on CV mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at low risk of cardiovascular diseases."

For the study, researchers collected data from more than 131, 000 people between the ages of 18 and 95 years old who had a health check up at the Paris IPC Preventive Medicine Center between January 2001 and December 2008.

During a mean 3.5 years follow up there were 95 cardiovascular deaths and 632 deaths from non-cardiovascular causes. Coffee or tea consumption was assessed by a self-administered questionnaire as one of three classes: none, 1 to 4, or more than 4 cups per day.

They found that there was a trend for tea drinking to decrease cardiovascular mortality but the effect was not quite significant after adjusting for age, gender and smoking. But tea significantly lowered the risk of non-cardiovascular death, with a hazard ratio of 0.76 for tea drinkers compared with no tea at all.

"Overall we tend to have a higher risk profile for coffee drinkers and a lower risk profile for tea drinkers," Danchin said. "We also found big differences with gender. Men tend to drink coffee much more than women, while women tend to drink more tea than men."

Researchers said that when they extended their analysis to 2011 they found that tea continued to reduce overall mortality during the 6 year period.

"Tea has antioxidants which may provide survival benefits," Danchin said. "Tea drinkers also have healthier lifestyles so does tea drinking reflect a particular person profile or is it tea, per se, that improves outcomes -- for me that remains an open question."

The findings were recently presented at ESC Congress 2014.

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