A recent study suggests that green tea a day boosts your enzyme production, in turn making it easier to fight cancer.

The study mentions that this result was found by using green tea concentrate equal to 8-16 cups of green tea. This makes me wonder whether it may cause some side effects, considering this earlier study that showed how amounts of over 10 cups of green tea a day can cause kidney and liver damage.

Apparently, drinking green tea in large quantities can cause kidney and liver damage. The New Scientist article reporting about this mentions that “up to 10 small cups of green tea a day is fine”. Rather unscientifically, it doesn’t tell us what the volume of a “small cup” is, but I take it to be around 200mL. This would mean that it’s still ok to drink up to 2 litres of green tea a day. I’ll need to keep that in mind, as my cups are 0.7L, and I can easily drink three of them a day (although I keep switching between green and rooibos tea).

Those taking green tea supplements should, however, apparently be somewhat concerned.

It’s a bit like David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers”, just this one is set in the fascinating world of antioxidant studies. You see, there isn’t just one vitamin E, but two of them, and one of them is clearly more destructive than the other.

From now on, remember to check whether the vitamin E you are consuming is of the alpha type (the “good one”, found in olive oil, almonds, sunflower seeds and mustard greens) or the gamma type (the one that destroys animal cells and that can be found in corn and soybean oil).

Obviously, as always, more has to be known about all this befofe you can really make any definite claims.