Drinking Green Tea does not Decrease Breast Cancer

The zeal with which North Americans are drinking green tea should be re-analyzed. Green tea and its extracts have been hyped up to cure everything underneath the sun (including the current economic woes). There are hundreds of green tea products on the market- some you can drink, others you can smell, some you can apply on your skin, others you can take a bath and yet others you can add to your regular enema.

Well, the latest study from Japan indicates that Green tea is Junk when it comes to breast cancer. The widely held belief that green tea can prevent breast cancer is just a myth according to this Japanese study.

Said Dr Motoli Iwasaki from the Epidemiology and Prevention Division at the Research Center for Cancer Prevention and Screening of the National Cancer Center in Tokyo, "Our findings suggest that green tea intake within a usual drinking habit is unlikely to reduce the risk of breast cance."


This study looked at close to 54,000 women who were surveyed for many years on how much green tea they consumed. At least 12 percent of the women drank less than one cup of green tea per week but the rest drank more than 5 cups of tea a day and some even drank more than 10 cups per day. After a follow-up of close to 14 years, the result showed that 350 women developed breast cancer and there was no correlation with how much tea they had consumed.


Iwasaki did emphasize that the research data was obtained before the diagnosis of breast cancer, "thereby avoiding the exposure recall bias inherent to case-control studies."

So for all green tea maniacs out there, listen up. Green tea is a great social beverage but as far as it medical healing properties are concerned- all that is a load of bunk.

The green tea business in North America alone is estimated to be worth close to $7 billion dollars.

The study is published in the October issue of Breast Cancer Research.