"Can Green Tea Help Prevent Cancer?"
Tea consumption is associated with a reduced risk of
heart disease, stroke, and premature death in general,
with each additional cup of green tea a day
associated with a 4% lower mortality risk.
So maybe, drinking several cups of tea daily
can keep the doctor away as well as the mortician.
But what about cancer?
There is growing evidence from laboratory, population, and human interventional studies
that tea can exert beneficial disease-preventive effects,
and further may actually slow cancer progression.
Let’s review some of that evidence.
Not only do those who drink a lot of tea
appear to live years longer than those who drink less,
drinking lots of tea may delay the onset of cancer.
Now, these are in Japanese tea cups, which only contain half a cup,
so the highest category here is greater than or equal to 5 full cups of tea, not 10.
The women who did get cancer appeared to get it 7 years later
if they had been drinking lots of tea compared to those who consumed less,
whereas men had a 3 year delay,
the difference male vs female potentially due to smoking habits.
Green tea may be able to interfere with each of the stages of cancer formation,
the initiation of the first cancer cell, promotion into a tumor,
and the subsequent progression and spread.
Cancer is often initiated when a free radical
oxidizes our DNA causing a mutation,
but within 40 minutes of drinking green tea
you can get a nice spike in antioxidant power of your bloodstream.
This increase, in turn, may lower oxidative damage
to DNA and so decrease the risk of cancer.
Furthermore, in terms of genoprotective effects—
protecting our genes— pre-existing oxidation- induced
DNA damage was lower after drinking green tea
suggesting that it can boost DNA repair as well,
but we didn’t know for sure...
until now.
There’s a DNA repair enzyme in our body called OGG1
and within one hour of drinking a single cup of green tea
we can boost its activity
though after a week of tea drinking we can boost it even higher
so regular intake of green tea may have additional benefits
in the prevention and/or repair of DNA damage.
Tea is so DNA protective it can be used for sperm storage,
for fresh samples until it can be properly refrigerated;
and so anti-inflammatory, it can be used for pain control
as a mouthwash after wisdom tooth surgery.
And in terms of controlling cancer growth,
at a dose of green tea compounds that would make it
into someone’s organs after drinking 6 cups of tea
it can cause cancer cells to commit suicide, apoptosis,
programmed cell death while leaving normal cells alone.
There’s lots of chemo agents that can kill cancer through brute force,
but that can make normal cells vulnerable too.
So green tea appears to be potentially an ideal agent for cancer prevention:
little or no adverse side-effects, efficacious for multiple cancers
at achievable dose levels; can be taken orally.
We have a sense of how it works, by stopping cancer cells from growing
causing them to off themselves.
It’s cheap and has a history of safe acceptable use.
But this was all based on in-vitro studies in a test tube.
It needs to be evaluated in human trials—
give people with cancer green tea to see if it helps.
Which we’ll explore, next…