The thrive diet

Your best toast to good health might come in a teacup. New research shows that drinking green tea is associated with lower risk of cancer of the esophagus. The 32 risk of getting this cancer dropped by 57 percent for men and 60 percent for women when they had daily tastes of that brew.

Re­searchers calculated this from interviews with 734 people with esophageal cancer and 1,552 without.

This finding has caused researchers to perk up and take notice be­cause the inci­dence of this can­cer has grown in the United States by 23 percent for men and 25 per­cent for women in the past 30 years. The tea can’t be your ordinary kind. The study focused on green tea, commonly served in Asian countries (and easy to find at health-food stores or from Asian gro­cers). Green tea is simply unfermented black tea. And in its unfermented state, it’s full of compounds called polyphenols. “These may have a number of ways of reducing your risk of cancer,” says study co-author Joseph K.McLaughlin,Ph.D., deputy chief of biostatis-tics at the National Can­cer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland. “Some polyphenols have an antioxidant effect like vita­mins C, E and various carotenoids. Some have an antitumor promotion and an anti-cell-prolifer­ation effect, and some can trap carcinogens so they become harmless.” When you make your brew, there are two good reasons to let the boiling water cool a bit. First, drinking boiling-hot flu­ids increases your risk of esophageal cancer. And second, green tea just tastes better this way.

Anything you can do to ward off esophageal cancer is a welcome ad­dition to the fairly small list of prevention strategies for this disease, which gives few warning signals.  More studies need to be done before scientists will know if downing this brew is effective against cancer. “If people want to be on the safe side,” says Dr. McLaughlin, “they should eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, eat a low-fat diet, exer­cise, not smoke and drink alcohol only moderately.”