Tea lovers, here's a good news for you - drinking tea reduces the risk of premature death, according to a new research.

Researchers examined the effects of coffee and tea on cardiovascular (CV) mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at low risk of cardiovascular diseases. They found that drinking tea reduces non-cardiovascular mortality by 24 percent.

For the study, 131, 401 people aged between 18 and 95 were assessed. All the participants had a health check up at the Paris IPC Preventive Medicine Center between January 2001 and December 2008. Researchers noted that during the study time frame there were 95 deaths from cardiovascular reasons and 632 deaths were non-CV related.

Researchers then tracked the coffee or tea consumption by a self-administered questionnaire and categorised as none, one to four cups per day, or more than four cups.

The findings revealed that those who consumed had higher CV risk profile than non-drinkers. The study stated that 57 percent of those drinking more than four cups per day were smokers. Those who did not drink coffee were physically fit and 45 percent of them had good physical activity as opposed to the 41 percent of the heavy coffee drinkers.

"This is highly significant in our large population," Professor Nicolas Danchin said in a press release. Researchers found that tea consumers had a better CV risk profile. Physical activity increased with the number of cups of tea per day from 43 percent in the moderate tea drinkers to 46 percent in the heavy drinkers.

The team did not find significant difference in blood pressure, with heavy coffee drinkers having a slightly lower systolic blood pressure (SBP) and higher diastolic blood pressure (DBP) compared to non-drinkers when adjusted for age.

"Overall we tend to have a higher risk profile for coffee drinkers and a lower risk profile for tea drinkers. We also found big differences with gender. Men tend to drink coffee much more than women, while women tend to drink more tea than men," Prof Danchin said.

However, researchers found that drinking tea reduced the risk of non-CV death, by a quarter for tea drinkers compared with those who did not drink tea at all. Researchers did not specifically what type of tea had positive effects on health. They explained that benefits of tea are mostly due to the flavonoid content, antioxidant ingredients that are thought to be good for the heart.

"Tea-drinking lowered the risk of non-CV death by 24 per cent and the trend towards lowering CV mortality was nearly (statistically) significant," Prof Danchin said.