There are as no simple answers to this question and researchers vary substantially in regard to what they believe are optimum quantities of human green tea consumption. For example, in a recent study conducted in Japan, men who drank a minimum of ten cups of green tea per day stayed cancer-free for three years longer than those men who drank less than three cups a day. Recently, a study by Cleveland's Western Reserve University concluded that drinking four or more cups of green tea per day could help prevent rheumatoid arthritis, or reduce symptoms in individuals already suffering from the disease. And Japanese scientists at the Saitama Cancer Research Institute discovered that there were fewer recurrences of breast cancer, and the disease spread less quickly, in women with a history of drinking five cups or more of green tea daily.
It gets more confusing. A University of California study on the cancer-preventative qualities of green tea concluded that you could probably attain the desired level of polyphenols (any of a large class of organic compounds, of plant origin that have antioxidant properties) by drinking merely two cups per day. On the other hand, a company selling a green tea capsule formula insists that ten cups per day are necessary to reap the maximum health benefits.
How can one make proper sense of all these conflicting claims? Given the aforementioned evidence above, it is probably a safe bet to plan on drinking at least four to five cups of green tea daily. If you're a real green tea aficionado, by all means drink as much as you like; but whether or not you'll derive added health benefits remains to be determined by the performance of further comprehensive research studies.
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