According to a Japanese study, it is a false belief that green tea helps in reducing the risk of breast cancer.

For the study, the researchers did a trial of 53,793 women who were interviewed on how much green tea they drank between 1995 and 1998.

Out of the total lot, nearly 12% consumed less than one cup of green tea per week and 27% drank over five cups of green tea in a day. Some women reported that they even drank over 10 cups in a day.

The lead researcher of the study, Dr. Motoki Iwasaki said that their findings suggest that intake of green tea within a normal drinking habit does not ensure that a person be at reduced risk of developing the breast cancer.

After about 14 years of follow-up data, the results indicated that as many as 350 women developed breast cancer and surprisingly it was not related to how many cups of green tea they consumed during the study period.

Dr. Iwasaki said that for the research the data was gathered before the participants were detected with breast cancer `thereby avoiding the exposure recall bias inherent to case-control studies'.

The findings of the result have been published in the October edition of the journal Breast Cancer Research.