Scientists say that green tea, though packed with anti-oxidants is not an effective drink to protect people against breast cancer.

Latest analysis looking at 54,000 women found no association between drinking green tea and breast cancer risk, a study said.

Dr Motoki Iwasaki, from the National Cancer Center, Tokyo, says results from human studies in the past have often been inconclusive. ‘Our large-scale, population-based prospective cohort study is one of the first to include a wide range of tea intakes; women who drank green tea less than 1 cup per week to those who drank 10 or more cups per day.’

The study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Breast Cancer Research, studied the tea intake among women between a span of five years and found that approximately 12 per cent of women drank green tea less than one cup per week while 27 per cent drank five or more cups per day.

Speaking about the survey, Dr Iwasaki said, ‘The other major strength of the present study was its prospective design, in which information was collected before the subsequent diagnosis of breast cancer, thereby avoiding the exposure recall bias inherent to case-control studies.’

Research concluded that drinking green tea as a beverage is unlikely to reduce the risk of breast cancer regardless of green tea type and number of cups.