Drinking Tea Lowers Your Blood Pressure

SUFFER FROM HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE?
Put your feet up and have eight cups of tea – By Matthew Holehouse

Having a nice cup of tea has long been the preferred way for the British to relax.  Now scientists have found that it really does lower the blood pressure.
Drinking eight cups of black tea a day “significantly” cuts blood pressure, researchers at the University of Western Australia found. Volunteers with normal to high blood pressure were given three drinks a day containing 429 milligrams of the plant chemicals polyphenols – the equivalent of eight and a half cups a day.
A second group were given a tea flavoured placebo.
After six months, the blood pressure of the tea-drinking group had fallen by between two and three millimetres of mercury.
Were the measures to be extended to the general population, researchers believe the number of people with high blood pressure would be cut by 10 per cent and the risk of heart disease would fall by between 7 and 10 per cent.
Reporting their results in the journal  Archives of Internal Medicine, the team, led by Dr Jonathan Hodgeson, wrote “Our study has demonstrated for the first time to our knowledge that long-term regular consumption of black tea can result in significantly lower blood pressure in individuals with normal to high-normal range of blood pressures”
Daily Telegraph – 28th January 2012