Did you drink tea when you were pregnant?
A new study has found that it might be bad for expectant mothers to drink tea while pregnant as it could have adverse birth outcomes.
It’s well known that tea is a source of caffeine, and while it has less caffeine in it than coffee, pregnant women still opt to drink it while expecting.
The study which was carried out by lead researcher Ling-Wei Chen, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Nutritional and Life Course Epidemiology, at University College Dublin.
The research was carried out on 1,000 Irish women and found a strong link between maternal caffeine intake and negative birth outcomes.
The majority of the women (48 percent) drank tea while pregnant as opposed to 39 percent drinking coffee.
In a statement, the UCD researchers said: “These findings and other study results, are from observational studies, and observational studies cannot prove that caffeine causes these outcomes, only that there is a link between them.
“To prove causation, scientists would need to conduct randomised controlled trials. However, to do so might be deemed ethically dubious.”
The researchers finished: “So our findings have potentially important public health implications in countries where a lot of black tea is consumed, such as Ireland and the UK.”
