Sometimes when you read so many conflicting studies, it can be really difficult to know what to believe. In the end, you have to listen to your own intuition and experience. How does eating a certain food or drinking a certain drink, or taking a certain supplement make you feel? Do you get sick often or are you pretty healthy most of the time?
These types of questions are probably more helpful than all the latest studies are, because I’m convinced that most of them contradict one another or are shaded in ways that don’t make them 100% accurate or unbiased. With that being said, I personally believe that green tea is a very healthful drink to add to your diet.
It has a lot of antioxidants, and even if it does not in and of itself reduce your risk of getting breast cancer, it certainly has enough other health benefits to make it totally worth drinking. Not only that, it does give a lot of people a nice energy boost throughout the day, and it also does have a great flavor, especially when you add a little squeeze of fresh lemon juice (which actually helps with antioxidant absorption) and a little bit of stevia or other natural sweetener.
The new study, to get back to the point of this writing, actually says that drinking green tea does not show any type of reduction in risk of getting breast cancer as previously thought. The study involved over 50,000 women, who were asked about their green tea drinking habits.
The study was impressively long, especially knowing that green tea wasn’t even so much on the health forefront as it is today. Then again, this study was carried out on Japanese women, and green tea has been heavily ensconced in the Asian culture now much longer than over here in the US. The study ran for 14 years, following these women and whether they developed breast cancer.
Over 300 of the women did end up developing breast cancer. However, when the researchers studied the green tea drinking habits of these women, they did not find any correlation to either drinking the green tea or not drinking the green tea.
While this is disappointing news obviously, especially for green tea devotees, it’s not a sign that you should stop drinking this healthful drink. I’d recommend drinking it only in it’s organic form, as tea leaves, just like coffee beans, can have tons of bug sprays and toxins on them, and organic will not have these contaminants on them, reducing the toxic load.
