Fancy a cup of tea? If you’re not already a tea drinker, you may want to become one because new research finds another health benefit to sipping this beverage: it can help lower your blood pressure. That’s thanks to something called flavanols, which are found in plants including tea, berries, apples, and pears.
A new study looked at the diets of more than 25-thousand people in the U.K. and compared what they ate with their blood pressure. It finds that a high intake of flavanols is linked with a “significantly lower” systolic blood pressure in both men and women. Loading up on flavanols could lower blood pressure as much as the DASH diet - which was designed specifically to treat high blood pressure - or the Mediterranean diet or cutting back on salt intake.
The biggest changes were seen in participants who had high blood pressure to begin with and those who consumed the highest amount of flavanols. While the main sources of flavanols in the British diet are tea, apples, berries and cocoa, there’s another source you may already be enjoying regularly: red wine.
Source: Eat This, Not That