Scientists from Peking University found that drinking green tea every day is linked to a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and several diabetic complications.
Diabetic macrovascular complications include coronary artery disease, peripheral arterial disease, and stroke) and diabetic microvascular complications (diabetic nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy).
How drinking tea affects the risk of diabetic complications and death in people with type 2 diabetes is unclear.
In the current study, researchers aimed to examine the associations of tea drinking with the long-term risk of developing type 2 diabetes and risks of diabetic complications and death in patients with diabetes.
The team used data from 482,425 people without diabetes and 30,300 patients with diabetes aged 30-79 years from the China Kadoorie Biobank.
The researchers found that of people drinking tea every day, 85.8% preferred green tea. In people without diabetes, 17,434 people developed type 2 diabetes during 11 years of follow-up.
Compared with people who never drank tea in the past year, daily tea drinkers had a lower risk of type 2 diabetes.
In patients with diabetes, the team found 6572 deaths, 12,677 diabetic macrovascular cases, and 2441 diabetic microvascular cases during follow-up. The cases included diabetic nephropathy, neuropathy, and retinopathy,
Compared with patients who never drank tea in the past year, daily tea drinkers had a lower death risk and risk of microvascular complications.
Tea drinking was not linked to the risk of macrovascular complications (heart disease, stroke, and peripheral arterial disease) in people with diabetes.
Moreover, the team found that only daily green tea drinking was linked to lower risks of type 2 diabetes and death.
Based on the findings, the researchers concluded that daily green tea drinking was associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and lower death risk in patients with diabetes, but the associations for other types of tea were less clear.
In addition, daily tea drinking was linked to a lower risk of diabetic microvascular complications, but not macrovascular complications.
The research is published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and was conducted by Jia Nie et al.
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