Can Green Tea Help Olympic Dopers?

A recent study suggests the answer may be “yes”.

Green tea is purported to have many positive health benefits. But can this ancient drink assist cheaters at the Olympics? USA Today tries to answer this question in a recent article.

Olympic officials are considering changing up their testing after a British study found that the drink might hide testosterone.

However, the study was conducted on a lab dish and not using humans, so scientists aren’t drawing any conclusions yet.

“It’s interesting that something as common as tea could have a significant influence on the steroid profile,” noted scientific director of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Oliver Rabin. “We may need to adjust our steroid [test] to allow us to exclude whether a test is modified by food or training or disease, before we can say that it’s doping.”

Doping experts state that athletes who are cheating via doping will have 200 to 300 percent more testosterone in their blood than normal athletes.

Charles Yesalis, who is a doping expert at Penn State, thinks officials needed to act quickly on this finding.

“Athletes will not wait for the clinical trials,” he said. “I’ll bet there are already lots of athletes out there drinking loads of green tea.”

For More: USA Today