Question
Is green tea good for me?
9 January 2014. Related: All topics, Starting treatment, Supplements and herbs.
Is green tea good for me? I am not on arv’s.
Answer
Hi
Green tea is unlikely to make any difference to the the way HIV affects your health. It is unlikely to increase your CD4 count or decrease your viral load.
It won’t do you any harm though, so if you like green tea, this is the best reason to drink it.
When your CD4 count is low enough to need treatment, HIV meds (ARVs) will be the best chance for you to get a good response. ARVs are the only treatment that have consistently proved to increase CD4 counts in HIV positive people.
Hi Bernard,
The only thing that can increase the CD4 of someone who is positive is ARVs, herbs cannot do this and there isn’t evidence to support this. Please see Q 2 here: https://i-base.info/qa/what-are-the-most-asked-questions
At the moment there isn’t a cure for HIV. However scientists all over the world are working towards a cure.
why did big permecitical don’t support herbal medicine yet there is evidence that it can work increasing cd4? question no 2.is it true that all world researchers fail to get hiv cure?
Hi Cjmoe,
If you like drinking turmeric tea, then that’s not a problem. It won’t though help with your HIV.
im taking fresh turmeric tea. is it ok to drink it while im on arv?
Hi Gugu, yes, no problem with tea and ARVs.
is it safe to have green tea while hiv positive and while I’m on arvs?
Yes, you can see from this question that drinking green tea is unlikely to have an effect on HIV or your ARVs. The best reason for drinking green tea is that you like it.
Can I drink green tea while I’m on ARVs?
Hi Robert
Please send me links for any of these studies and I will happily review them and change my answer if I am wrong. Green tea, as with black tea, is an anti-oxident and this might have health benefits but it is very difficult to pin these down in any studies in real people. Health claims are made for lots of things but HIV positive people have the right for these claims to be substantiated with research.
Often, an interesting property of a compound is reported in a test tube study, but this in the context of early development of potential treatment. This is very different from claiming that drinking tea will make any measurable difference.
For example, this study reports that a component in green tea (a type of catechin called epigallocatechin gallate or EGCG) has interesting HIV properties in a test tube. The study concludes that this component might therefore be interesting for further research to study. That was back in 2009 and I haven’t read any update since, but may have missed this.
This was with a direct mechanism which is interesting, (rather than the indirect effect because of the anti-oxident properties) and there is still no data in real HIV positive people.
From another perspective, you might imagine that HIV might have different outcomes in countries where green tea in commonly an important part of the diet. This hasn’t been reported. HIV in Japan or China or other east Asian countries is pretty much the same as in the UK.
“Credible insight” is only credible if it is based on data, and “professionals” by definition should publish their results.
As green tea may be more expensive that regular tea, I am not going to suggest there is any benefit at all just because it might be fashionable to think this. If you send a few links to the studies that have convinced you of the benefits I am happy to discuss these online.
Until then I stand by the suggestion that drinking green tea is unlikely to do you any harm but also unlikely to have any noticeable impact on your HIV health.
I think this answer is completely false, there are many documented studies from professionals that have given most credible insight on the effects of Green Tea and HIV. Which are anything but “unlikely to make a difference.”