Originally Posted by
bocastephen
Matcha tea is green tea powder from Japan - where it has been consumed for centuries without causing cancer, if anything, it helps guard against it.
Maybe they are drinking something else in Brazil? Given that part of the world, it could be anything - although my guess is they are drinking powdered tea spiked with an alphabet soup of chemicals, pesticides, and fertilizers, any or all of which could cause stomach cancer.
The statistics of green tea drinking being linked to higher incidences of gastric cancer make sense.
Japan has (along with South Korea and Mongolia) the highest rates of gastric cancer in the world.
When Japanese people leave Japan to live elsewhere, they usually become less likely to succumb to gastric cancer, particularly when they adopt the new country’s diet.
The reduced chances of getting gastric cancer are striking for those who emigrated to the USA, but less so for those who went to Brazil (Brazil has a significant ethnic Japanese population, they started moving there 125 years ago).
Green tea is linked to the Japanese diet. Despite many Japanese scientists arguing that it can have a mitigating effect on gastric cancer, it is still going to be statistically linked with a population within Brazil who are more prone to stomach cancer than other groups.
Personally, I don’t think there is anything to worry about UNLESS you are one of these people who want to take matcha several times a day. Anything in excess is potentially bad for you, and matcha is a particularly potent form of green tea where every part (except the pre-discarded leaf veins and stalks) is ingested.