Tea Consumption and All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality in the UK Biobank

Sometimes I am amazed that after millenia of tea drinking, we're still unpacking its physiological effects. I guess its front-loaded to the latter half of the last century, in the sense that the analytical and related statistical tools simply didn't exist until modern times. Fermented vs non-fermented introduces another level of complexity in the story. There were informal lines of reasoning which said without tea, the british empire would have crumbled. It is unclear if they mean without the drive to harvest it, or drink it in the trenches under gunfire.

Coffee is just the same really. Long long history of consumption. Weak levels of understanding what if any protective health qualities it has. Is it mental? is it bowel cancer? is it prostate cancer? we're still finding out.

A problem for me is that cola nut, which is just as interesting, would be very hard to unpack from high fructose corn syrup, sugar, artificial sweeteners. It is so very rare to imbibe cola without them. If you walk down the tea hierarchy to the fruit and non-caffiene teas, the cohort drops off rapidly (I drink red zinger, its hibiscus. it also has liquorice root extract which isn't meant to be good for my BP but they say Hibiscus flower is, so maybe that balances out)

Increased rates of Osophageal cancer were held to come from drinking hot liquids. I think we have a different sense of this now. GERD is not about hot water apparently.

My urologist asks me to drink 1.5l of water a day, or pay for his new yacht. Such is the lot of people who excrete oxalate into their kidneys. Another reason to avoid liquorice, spinach, strawberries, rhubarb.. But thank goodness, NOT tea.