Tea could help develop prostate cancer
Drinking more than seven cups of tea could increase the risk of developing prostate cancer.
According to new research, which tracked the health of more than 6,000 male volunteers for almost forty years, people who drink more than seven cups of tea daily are 50% more likely to have prostate cancer than those who have the least from 0-3 cups a day.
People who drink tea at a moderate level from four to six cups a day are not at any risk of developing the disease.
Dr. Kashif Shafique, from the University of Glasgow, UK, said: “Most previous research has shown either no relationship with prostate cancer for black tea or some preventive effect of green tea.
“We don’t know whether tea itself is a risk factor or if tea drinkers are generally healthier and live to an older age when prostate cancer is more common anyway”.
However, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) noticed that the study had “many limitations that call into question the reliability of its results” even though the research is long and large in size.
For instance, they noticed that information about tea consumption and extra lifestyle factors were only collected at the start of the study.
They said: “Given the average follow-up was 28 years, it is unlikely that tea drinking habits, and other behaviour such as alcohol and smoking levels, remained stable over this entire period. This could have affected the results”.
The study started in 1970, in Scotland and collected data from more than 6,000 male volunteers who were aged between 21 and 75 years of age.
The volunteers were asked about their usual tea consumption, coffee, alcohol, smoking habits and general health and attended a screening test.
Just under a quarter of the men said they were heavy tea drinkers and out of these, just over a fifth developed prostate cancer.
The data analysis revealed that people who consumed more than seven cups of tea daily had an increased risk of prostate cancer in comparison to the ones who drank no tea or less than four cups each day.
Dr Shafique added: “We found that heavy tea drinkers were more likely not to be overweight, be non alcohol-drinkers and have healthy cholesterol levels. However, we did adjust for these differences in our analysis and still found that men who drank the most tea were at greater risk of prostate cancer”.
