Want To Improve Your Bone Health? New Study Says To Drink This

Building strong healthy bones is no easy feat (especially as you get older). Bone is living tissue that continually remodels. Making sure bone breakdown doesn't outpace bone building requires strength training, getting plenty of protein, and focusing on micronutrients like calcium and vitamin D. But those aren't the only dietary inputs to better bone health. Tea may also play a role.

The goal of this study was to understand whether tea consumption and circulating tea-derived flavan-3-ols (a class of plant compounds found in tea) are associated with bone mineral status over time.

A new study suggests that tea consumption may be associated with more favorable bone health over time. Researchers followed 1,708 middle-aged and older adults from the Guangzhou Nutrition and Health Study for up to 13 years, measuring their bone mineral density (BMD) at four separate visits.

The researchers found that people who reported drinking tea at a moderate frequency generally had the most favorable BMD measures, including at the whole body, lumbar spine, and femoral neck. For example, moderate-frequency tea drinkers had significantly higher adjusted BMD Z-scores at the lumbar spine and femoral neck compared with the other tea-consumption groups.

The relationship wasn't a simple case of more tea equals better bones. The moderate-frequency group tended to have the most favorable measures, while the researchers did not establish an optimal amount of tea to drink for bone health.

Also, the study measured BMD rather than fracture risk or osteoporosis diagnoses, so these findings don't mean tea prevents osteoporosis. Still, the results add to a growing body of research investigating how tea, and its abundance of plant compounds called flavan-3-ols—may relate to bone health as we age.

Tea is a dietary source of a class of polyphenols called flavan-3-ols. Researchers measured five tea-related flavan-3-ols in participants' blood: epicatechin (EC), epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), epicatechin gallate (ECG), epigallocatechin (EGC), and catechin.

Higher levels of these biomarkers were generally associated with more favorable bone mineral measures, and the associations were particularly extensive for ECG and EGCG. Why? Flavan-3-ols have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and preclinical research suggests some tea polyphenols may influence pathways involved in oxidative stress and inflammation, as well as the activity of osteoblasts (the cells that build new bone) and osteoclasts (the cells that break bone down). EGCG and other tea polyphenols have been investigated for their potential effects on bone metabolism.

That said, the relationships weren't consistently linear and having more of these compounds circulating in your blood didn't simply translate to progressively better bone measures.