First evidence on the causal association between green tea and gastrointestinal health: a two sample mendelian randomization study

ABSTRACT

In light of the persisting ambiguity surrounding the causality between green tea intake and gastrointestinal health, this study endeavors to elucidate it using mendelian randomization. Leveraging data from the UK Biobank and FinnGen database, instrumental variants were selected from single-nucleotide-polymorphisms associated with green tea intake. The inverse-variance-weighted method served as the primary analytical approach. Rigorous scrutiny of the results encompassed the Egger intercept test, Mendelian Randomization Presso, Cochran Q test, leave-one-out test, and funnel plot. The primary findings underscore a significant association between green tea intake and gastrointestinal diseases (p = 0.001), indicating heightened consumption of green tea could lead to a reduced risk of gastrointestinal diseases (odds ratio = 0.994). Robustness assessments across all measures substantiate the credibility of these outcomes (all p > 0.05). In conclusion, this study supports the assertion that green tea confers beneficial effects on gastrointestinal health.

KEYWORDS:

• Green tea
• gastrointestinal disease
• mendelian randomization
• nutrition
• food

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the staffs in UK biobank and the FinnGen project. The authors thank Binhong Duan (Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital) for her contribution in revising the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Consent to participate

The informed consent has been obtained by UK biobank and the FinnGen project when individual data was collected, and it is unnecessary to inform again for usage of summary data, according to the provisions of the above projects.

Data availability statement

Data is available through corresponding author.

Notes on contributor

Design, ZXJ and YL; analysis, ZXJ and RLL; writing, ZXJ and RLL; supervision, YL. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

Statement of ethics

The data used in this research are publicly available and were obtained with corresponding ethical approval, thereby rendering additional ethical approval unnecessary.