Should you worry about drinking too much tea?

I drink tea. A lot of tea.

Black tea, green tea, herbal tea, hot tea, iced tea, and pretty much any other tea I happen to have. I like it. It tastes good, it is easy to make, inexpensive and zero calories. It’s pretty much the perfect drink for me. There is even evidence that tea drinking can improve your health.

Tea is great!

Or is it?

You can imagine my concern when I saw headlines today that tea drinking raises prostate cancer risk.

What!?

But then I did a little more investigating. You always should be a bit skeptical when reading any study about health, nutrition and cancer. Here is a point by point dissection of the study.

While the data does show that men who drink more than 7 cups a day had a 50% increase risk of cancer, the incidence of cancer was small and there were a number of factors that were not controlled for. (e.g. type of tea, family history, lifestyle choices). All this adds up to say, there is not much to this study.

Of course, I could be suffering from confirmation bias.

Still, I’m going to keep drinking my tea. Maybe just not as much.