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American Morning
The Big Question: Can Drinking Tea Actually Save Your Life?
Aired May 07, 2002 - 08:38 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Time for our "Big Question" this morning, can drinking tea actually save your life? Long believed to be beneficial to your health, now there is a new study out that shows that drinking tea can dramatically improve your chances of surviving a heart attack.
CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen joins us now to explain.
Is it time for tea this morning, Elizabeth? Good morning.
ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I haven't had my tea yet. I'm hoping when I'm done with this to go down and glug some. This study is very interesting, Paula, what it did, is it took about 2000 people who had heart attacks, and then looked at them for three years following the heart attack to see who died and who didn't and how much tea they drank during that time, and these are the results: Folks who drank two cups of tea a week had a 21 percent lower risk of death than though who didn't drink any tea. Folks who drank three cups a day had a 46 percent lower risk than folks who didn't drink any tea.
Those are pretty big numbers. And you might wonder, gee, what is it about tea? Well, there's something in tea called flavonoids, and what they seem to do is they seem to, a, have a good effect on your cholesterol, and, b, they also seem to make the blood platelets less sticky, so the tea seems to have an anti-clotting effect, and that's the theory as to why tea seems to be good for you.
There are flavonoids in many other foods. We have a list of them. They're apples, onions, broccolis, oranges, and then if you really want to have fun, chocolate and red wine are also high in flavonoids. So it doesn't appear to be just tea, but then of course you don't want to be drinking red wine all day, so tea may be the better choice -- Paula.
ZAHN: So let me ask this, if we start eating those foods rich in flavonoids and start drinking tea, can that prevent those of us who have never had a heart attack before from having one?
COHEN: You know what, when we think about, gee, what do we do about this study, really, I have two words and those are beta carotene. The reason why I bring up beta carotene is that years ago, there were studies that showed that if you got a lot of beta carotene in your diet, you would be much, much healthier. Tons of studies showed that.
And then Later, when they did better study, they said, oh, you know what, never mind, beta carotene's fine, but it's not necessarily going to keep you all that much healthier. It's not going to prevent disease the way that we thought it would. This tea study is a very good sort of first-level study, but they need to do much better ones, and they may come back and say, go drink tea, sure, that's fine, however, we don't think that it has the same health effects we used to think it had.
ZAHN: So far, do they have any idea whether what kind of tea you drink makes a difference? Hot tea, cold tea, green tea, camille (ph) tea?
COHEN: Right, green tea and black tea are the ones they studied and are the ones that seem to have this good effect, and I don't think it matters if it's hot or cold.
ZAHN: And coming back to beta carotene, that would be like having to eat carrots?
(CROSSTALK)
COHEN: Right, exactly. And beta carotene is great. It's in the family of antioxidants, which are vitamins like A, C, E and beta carotene, and there's nothing wrong with them, it's just that they thought it had this real serious effect on heart disease and cancer, and then they found out that actually it really didn't.
ZAHN: So in the meantime, while we try to thrash out all of this information, there's no harm in trying to encourage yourself to eat these foods high in flavonoids, and beta carotene, and drinking tea every now and then.
COHEN: Exactly, tea, onions, broccolis, oranges, I mean, go to town, eat a ton of them. There's absolutely no reason why not to. You night not want to eat a ton of chocolate, because you can get fat. You might not want to drink a ton of red wine, because you'll get really drunk. But as for the other ones, go ahead, drink them, eat them. it doesn't really matter what the studies say, they're not really going to do you any harm and they're good for you.
ZAHN: We were so happy to find chocolate on your list this morning.
COHEN: So was I.
ZAHN: We didn't know it had flavonoids in it.
COHEN: Go figure.
ZAHN: So when we're cheating, it's yet another inducement to dip into that good stuff.
COHEN: Exactly.
ZAHN: Thanks, Elizabeth, appreciate the house call this morning.
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