Tea May Boost Chances of Pregnancy
28 Mar 2012
By World Tea News
BOSTON, Mass.
Researchers at Boston University studying women who were trying to conceive found that tea drinkers were 27 percent more likely to become pregnant.
The year-long study of 3,600 Danish women found that drinking two cups of tea a day boost the chance of pregnancy compared to a control group. It is the largest study of caffeine on pregnancy.
The study also revealed women who drank two cola-style carbonated beverages daily were 20 percent less likely to become pregnant.
The findings suggest that switching from cola to tea could significantly enhance the chances of pregnancy.
Professor Elizabeth Hatch said the discovery is secondary to the purpose of the study which was designed to determine whether caffeine intake affected the chances of pregnancy.
Findings from the study revealed drinking coffee doesn’t affect your chance of getting pregnant.
She cautioned that previous studies strongly suggest that women who are trying to get pregnant and those expecting a child should avoid caffeine. The results of previous research were not conclusive.
In this study Hatch and her colleagues monitored each volunteer for a year. Danish women of average 28 years of age were chosen for the research because every Danish citizen is given a civil registration number at birth, allowing health officials to recruit and then screen individuals through the internet.
“We don’t know how they took the tea or if they added milk or lemon, but they had this increased chance of getting pregnant over women who did not drink tea at all,” Professor Hatch reported. “It may be linked to caffeine but clearly there may be other factors linked with the women’s lifestyle or there may be beneficial properties in tea itself,” she said.
The researcher cautioned though that although tea increased chances of having a baby, it was not a miracle cure that guaranteed pregnancy.
“I think drinking two or three cups of tea a day for anyone wishing to get pregnant will be fine. I would love to say tea is a miracle cure to get pregnant but that is not realistic. There may be other factors. The tea drinkers tended to be older women and there may be something else in their diet or lifestyle that helped.”
Tea contains a lot of antioxidants “which are very good for male and female fertility,” according to Maha Ragunath, consultant in reproductive medicine at the Care Fertility Centre in Nottingham, U.K. “But I don't think women trying for a baby should now drink lots of tea, it's everything in moderation."
According to reports on the Growing Your Baby website, “researchers found that green tea, which is believed to boost pregnancy chances, did not have any additional affects and increased conception chances in the same way as any other tea.”
The team is now trying to find further links between tea consumption and pregnancy and if it affects baby’s health, birth size, pregnancy complications and chances of miscarriage.
Source: Growing Your Baby, Deccan Chronicle
As reported by World Tea News March 7 2012
Pathologists examining a large sample of lung cancer patients in four separate studies in Taiwan, the Czech Republic and the United States report significant protection from drinking tea.
In one Taiwan study cancer cells in patients consuming at least one cup of green tea daily failed to form layers characteristic of abnormal cells. A second, four-year study compared 170 cancer patients with 340 healthy controls to better understand and isolate the impact of smoking habits, genetic factors and green tea consumption.
The study, published in the medical journal Hematology Oncology concluded that tea significantly decreases a person’s risk for lung cancer.
In a separate report Kaiser Permanente researchers tracked 126,293 people who provided baseline data from 1978 to 1985 and followed them until 2008 to determine their risk for developing lung cancer in relation to cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, gender, ethnicity, BMI, and level of education.
They found individuals who consume high amounts of black tea and fruit, as well as those with higher BMIs, have a lower risk of developing lung cancer, while those who consume more than three alcoholic drinks per day have an increased risk of developing the disease, according to three separate studies presented at CHEST 2011, the 77th annual meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians (ACCP).
The Czech study found that consumption of black tea had a protective effect on nonsmoking women, while fruit had a protective effect for both men and women.
In the green tea study patients with lung cancer exhibited a higher proportion of smoking, green tea consumption of less than one cup per day, exposure to cooking fumes and family history of lung cancer than controls, according to the study results. An elevated risk was observed in smokers who never drank green tea, as compared with smokers who drank more than one cup of green tea per day.
Doctors the Changhwa Christian Hospital in Taiwan catalogued five different variations of lung cancer. Tea was offered in quantities from 30 to 50 ml to total 100 to 120 ml per day.
“Our study suggests a protective effect of green tea on lung cancer elicited by cigarette smoking,” the researchers said. “Green tea drinkers have a reduced risk of lung cancer. Heavy smokers have a higher risk of lung cancer. This result may indicate that smoking-induced pulmonary carcinogenesis may be modulated by green tea consumption and the growth factor environment.”
Finally, a second Taiwanese study in 2010 examined the smoking and tea drinking habits of more than 500 people, and found that the risk of lung cancer was 5 times higher in those who did not drink green tea. Among smokers, the risk was 12 times higher.
A new study shows for the first time how EGCG in green tea might work to suppress lung cancer by raising levels of a molecule called mi-R210 inside lung cancer cells. Cells with higher levels of mi-R210 multiplied more slowly than lung cancer cells with lower levels, the study showed. In addition, cells with high mi-R210 levels lost the ability to grow on top of each other, a hallmark of cancer cells.
The study was published in the September issue of the journal Carcinogenesis.
