A cup of tea could be just what the doctor ordered after a new study found that those who love a cuppa live longer.

The study, led by the UK National Cancer Institute, found that people who drink two or more cups of tea a day are likely to live longer than those who don’t.

The study notes that the findings are the same regardless of the temperature of your tea and whether you take milk or sugar.

The results were based on a study involving 498,043 men and women between ages 40 and 69 in the UK.

Some 85% of the participants said they regularly drank tea and 89% of those said they regularly drank black tea.

The participants were followed for about 11 years with mortality information drawn from a UK NHS database.

The found that people who drink two or more cups of black tea per day had a 9% to 13% lower risk of death from any cause than people who did not drink tea.

Higher tea consumption was also associated with a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, ischemic heart disease, and stroke.

Madrid public health professor Fernando Rodríguez Artalejo said the findings represent a "substantial advance in the field," as most previous studies were carried out in Asia where green tea is more popular than black tea.

The study does not definitively establish that tea helps people live longer, because it cannot exclude that this is down to other health factors associated with tea consumption.

The findings have been published in Annals of Internal Medicine.