Chinese love to drink tea, is love to the bones, when you get up in the morning to drink a cup of tea, just like Europeans and Americans love to drink coffee, tea and coffee can provide the body with a certain amount of caffeine, caffeine can stimulate the center, so that we maintain more vigorous energy.
Drink a cup of tea after a meal, have a cup of tea when reading a book, drink a cup of tea when basking in the sun, and still need tea when entertaining guests, in the thousands of years of Chinese civilization, tea has formed a culture, engraved in the inheritance memory of every Chinese.
In modern times, there are more and more studies on tea, but the debate has never stopped, some people think that drinking tea is good for health, because tea contains a variety of antioxidants, such as tea polyphenols, these antioxidants are very helpful for the prevention of cancer and cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, but some people think that drinking too much tea may have the opposite effect on health, because tea contains caffeine.
Professor Li Liming's team from the School of Public Health of Peking University published a study in the European Journal of Epidemiology, in which researchers followed nearly 500,000 subjects in mainland China for an average of 10.1 years, and found out how much tea the subjects drank in the form of questionnaires. The final analysis found that people who drank more than 4 grams of tea a day had a 26% increased overall risk of cancer, a 62% increased risk of lung cancer, and a 29% increased risk of stomach cancer compared to those who drank tea less than once a week.
After excluding the effects of smoking and drinking, the relationship between tea drinking and cancer will be much weaker. People who drank more than 4 grams of tea a day had only a 13% higher overall risk of cancer, a 31% higher risk of lung cancer, and an 18% higher risk of stomach cancer than those who drank tea less than once a week.
When seeing the results of such a study, I believe that many people are shocked, I really can't imagine that if you drink too much tea, it will also induce cancer, after all, in everyone's traditional concept, tea has always been to prevent cancer.
The question is, is such a study really reliable?
In fact, if you analyze carefully, it is easy to find that if you do not eliminate the habit of smoking and drinking, drinking tea is obviously related to the occurrence of cancer, but if you eliminate the habit of smoking and drinking, then the relationship between tea drinking and cancer is significantly weakened, which shows that in fact, the main culprit of cancer is smoking and alcoholism.
It is true that there has never been a guideline that defines tea as a carcinogen, but cigarettes and alcohol are different, the World Health Organization clearly identified cigarettes and alcohol as class I carcinogens, long-term smoking and alcohol abuse can induce a variety of cancers, including lung cancer, stomach cancer, liver cancer, colorectal cancer, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer and so on.
As for drinking tea, it is mainly believed that drinking tea in the wrong way may increase the risk of cancer.
1. The temperature is too high when drinking tea
Many people like to drink gongfu tea, when the tea is very hot, they can't wait to drink it, as everyone knows, high temperature is very damaging to the esophageal mucosa, our esophageal mucosa is very fragile, and it is particularly sensitive to temperature, if you drink very hot tea, the direct consequence is to burn the esophageal mucosa, once drinking gongfu tea forms a habit, drinking like this for a long time, it will lead to repeated stimulation of the esophageal mucosa, and the risk of esophageal cancer will naturally be greatly increased for a long time.
2. I like to drink strong tea
Many people especially like to drink strong tea, the stronger the tea in the caffeine content, the higher the caffeine content, too much caffeine, it is easy to stimulate the secretion of gastric acid, for a long time, it is easy to induce gastritis, gastric ulcers, and even stomach cancer.
3. Tea and tobacco and alcohol are not separated
Many people like to associate tea with alcohol and tobacco, as in this study, because alcohol and tobacco are clear carcinogens, combined with a large amount of tea, it will lead to a higher incidence of cancer.
Therefore, as long as you pay attention to the way you drink tea, you don't need to worry too much about the carcinogenic risk of drinking tea, when drinking tea, don't be very hot, it's best to wait for the temperature to drop down before drinking, don't drink strong tea when drinking tea, drink weak tea, so that the daily caffeine intake will not be excessive, and don't smoke or drink too much when drinking tea, and drink tea as a healthy lifestyle, and should not be associated with other bad habits.