Over the last few years, green tea has taken a prominent place in health blogs, nutritionists’ advice, health conscious individual’s diet and overall green tea has become synonymous to good health. But is it all good? A team of researchers from University of California has found that green tea may adversely affect your fertility and development in case of regular and frequent use.
The experiments were conducted on fruit flies, and the team discovered that consumption of green teas in excess adversely affected development and reproduction in fruit fly populations. The team had explored the effects of green tea toxicity on the reproduction and development in fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Various doses of green tea polyphenols were given to fruit fly embryos and larvae. The larvae which received 10 milligrams of green tea were born smaller, were slower to develop and showed a dramatic decline in the number of off spring.
Green tea is very popular globally and is known for its brain and heart health and anti-cancer properties.
The team also revealed that in other tests on mice and dogs, large amounts of green tea reduces a dog’s body weight dramatically. As for mice, their embryo development is negatively affected. “We are planning to measure total consumption and identify and quantify the metabolites of natural products in flies,” Jafari pointed out, adding that these experiments will enable us to have a better understanding of toxic doses in humans.
