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Tea Loses Its Key Health Benefit if you Add Milk

Many scientific studies have touted the benefits of drinking tea as a way to reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. Now a study from Germany offers an interesting twist: If you add milk to your hot tea, it wipes out the protective effect against cardiovascular disease.

Tea offers its heart health benefits by improving blood flow and helping the arteries to relax, but milk seems to prevent this, according to researchers at the Charite Hospital at the University of Berlin in Mitte. "The beneficial effects of drinking black tea are completely prevented by the addition of milk," Dr. Verena Stangl, a cardiologist at the hospital, told Reuters. "If you want to drink tea to have the beneficial health effects you have to drink it without milk. That is clearly shown by our experiments."

Those experiments involved 16 healthy women who were given hot tea to drink with and without milk. Ultrasound was used to measure the function of an artery in the forearm immediately before and two hours after drinking tea. While black tea significantly improved blood flow compared to just drinking water, that effect was dulled when milk was added to the tea. "We found that, whereas drinking tea significantly increased the ability of the artery to relax and expand to accommodate increased blood flow compared with drinking water, the addition of milk completely prevents the biological effect," Dr. Mario Lorenz, a molecular biologist and co-author of the study, told Reuters. Tests on rats produced similar results.