How Drinking Tea May Reduce Your Risk of Heart Disease and Stroke?

Recently the prescription of tea for heart patients is increasing. It seems like this super drink is not just capable of waking you up every morning but is also a complementary medicine for the heart.

There is also strong evidence that black and green tea can cause a reduction in both coronary heart disease and stroke risk between 10 and 20%.

But how can drinking tea reduce your risks of heart disease? And do you gain the benefits from all teas, or is there any magic tea with unparalleled qualities? What are its potent qualities that make tea for the heart a savior?

We’ll answer all these questions in this article, and more. So, stay tuned!

3 Reasons Why You Get Benefits Of Tea For Heart Patients

1. Tea reduces inflammation.

Your body goes into inflammation body as a defensive response. It can be anything like injury, burns, infections, or antibodies, among other things.

It is a normal process to start the body’s tissue repair mechanisms. But not harmful only to a certain extent.

You see, when your body goes through sustained inflammation for a long time, it may damage the surrounding tissue. This can harm the blood vessels, which can get irritated.

By irritating the blood vessels, inflammation can encourage plaque formation. It can also release plaque in the arteries and generate blood clots, which are the leading cause of heart attacks and strokes.

A heart attack occurs when a blood clot plugs a coronary artery. A stroke happens when a blood clot blocks a brain artery.

Now there are other ways to ensure you stay away from avoidable inflammation. For instance, you should keep your weight healthy. Avoid getting injured and stressed, stop smoking, and reduce drinking alcohol.

But these may take time if you don’t have the correct lifestyle habits. An easy way to go is drinking tea.

Green tea has about 2000 compounds, each of which has some health advantages. Polyphenols, however, are the best.

Green tea and its primary compound, epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) – a polyphenol – have been shown to have anti-inflammatory properties.

EGCG helps suppress the gene related to Inflammatory cytokines and inflammation-related enzymes. Thus, tea for heart patients is a boon that helps fight inflammation and reduces the risks that are stressing you out.

2. Tea reduces blood pressure.

Smoking, obesity, too much salt, old age, stress, genetics, can all cause high blood pressure. It is when the heart has to work with more effort and more time to pump blood into blood vessels that carry it along with essential nutrients and oxygen to all parts of the body.

With all these causes damaging cells in your body, the organs need more of the crucial nutrients to heal themselves. With additional requirements comes an extra supply of blood. But now, the heart has to work hard and pump more blood.

Thankfully, certain chemicals in black and green tea can relax blood vessels. They do this by activating ion channel proteins present in blood vessel walls.

These compounds are two catechin-type flavonoids (epicatechin gallate and epigallocatechin-3-gallate). They work to activate KCNQ5. This ion channel protein is present in the smooth muscle that lines the blood arteries.

Ultimately they help the blood vessels to pass smoothly. So your organs get their nutrients and oxygen easily and heal without raising blood pressure.

3. Tea increases good cholesterol.

According to a 2011 study in a Harvard journal, drinking green tea drastically lowers LDL (bad) cholesterol.

An American Heart Association study also showed tea can counter the decrease in HDL in people as they age. HDL stands for high-density lipoprotein.

Researchers tracked more than 80,000 residents of Kailuan, a hamlet in Tangshan, China, for six years. Study participants who regularly drank tea showed a slower decline in HDL levels, with age. Participants in this study experienced a corresponding 8 percent decline in cardiovascular risk.

Why do we need to care about increasing HDL, you ask? Well, HDL cholesterol is good cholesterol. It helps remove bad cholesterol from the body, thus helping your heart stay strong.

At times low HDL levels are also associated with the risk of strokes. And also atherosclerosis (a complication with the arteries getting narrower) and heart attacks.

But Which Tea Should You Drink To Lower Your Risk?

Did you know? 40,530 Japanese adults participated in a study that found those who drank five or more cups of green tea a day had a 26% lower risk of heart attack or stroke. Furthermore, green tea drinkers were 16% less likely to die from all causes than those who drank fewer than one cup a day.

Here’s another research suggesting that adding green tea to the daily diet lowered the death risk of stroke survivors by 62%. On the other hand, adding coffee to the daily diet lowered the death risk of heart attack survivors by 22%.

In terms of tea, black tea is a close equivalent of coffee.

So, if you were to choose which is the best tea to reduce your risk of heart disease and strokes, we suggest going with black tea or green tea.

You could probably also try both. Try alternating with each after considering the workload you have on any given day. If you have busy mornings, the caffeine in black tea may be of better use than green tea.

What do you say? Isn’t tea for heart patients a magic potion?