London, Sep 1 (IANS): If you have to choose between tea or coffee, it is probably better to drink tea for its antioxidant benefits.

According to a large study, drinking tea reduces non-cardio-vascular (CV) mortality by 24 percent.

"Coffee and tea are important components of our way of life. We investigated their effects on CV mortality and non-CV mortality in a large French population at low risk of cardiovascular diseases," said Professor Nicolas Danchin from France at the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) Congress 2014 in Barcelona, Spain.

The study included 131,401 people aged 18 to 95.

During the average 3.5 year follow-up period, there were 95 deaths from CV and 632 deaths from non-CV causes.

The researchers found that coffee drinkers had a higher CV risk profile than non-coffee drinkers.

Non-coffee drinkers were more physically active, with 45 percent having a good level of physical activity compared to 41 percent of the heavy coffee drinkers.

Tea drinkers had the reverse profile of coffee drinkers, with consumers having a better CV risk profile than non-consumers.

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.

"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," Danchin emphasised.

"I think you could fairly honestly recommend tea drinking rather than coffee drinking," he told the gathering.