© 1998 by Oxford University Press
A cup of tea provides an antioxidant boost that may protect against several types of cancers, but so far the link has been reliably shown only in tea-sipping rodents and test tubes -- not in people. The antioxidants in green and black tea, called catechins, are "more potent than vitamins C and E" in their ability to scavenge potentially carcinogenic compounds called free radicals, said Catherine Rice-Evans, Ph.D., of the Antioxidant Research Centre in London.
However, Rice-Evans and other tea experts cautioned that despite promising early research, better animal models and more robust epidemiological studies are needed before tea research steams toward human trials. A decade may pass before enough clinical evidence accumulates to validate or refute tea's anti-cancer potential.
"The in vitro and animal data [are] very strong," said Jeffrey Blumberg, Ph.D., who researches tea antioxidants at Tufts University in Tea Therapy? Out of the Cup, Into the Lab