Student - February 21, 2008
No anaemia from tea for South Africans
South Africans don’t have to worry about drinking tea. A Wageningen researcher came to this conclusion while doing research for her MSc thesis at the North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. Contrary to what nutritionists assumed from lab experiments, tea does not reduce the amount of iron in the blood of South Africans.
This was not the case, Hogenkamp discovered. Although fifteen percent of the women had an iron deficiency in their blood, the men and women who drunk the most tea had an even higher iron content in their blood than normal. ‘Maybe South Africans don’t drink tea that often with food after all,’ says Hogenkamp, thinking out loud. ‘The data we have don’t say anything about this. They only tell us how much tea people drink, not when. But from our research we can conclude that it’s not necessary to advise South Africans to stop drinking tea.’
Hogenkamp’s research will be published in the British Journal of Nutrition.