Yikes. There's a ton of information but no good reassurance either way.
I have links to the articles that seem to underlie the concerns of the pharmacists at CINJ (as well as the pharmacists that maintain Cancer Supportive Survivorship Care:
http://www.cancersupportivecare.com/complementary.html). The first link is to the Labriola/Livingston article of 1999:
http://www.cancernetwork.com/display...le/10165/68553
Unfortunately, the above link requires a login, but registration is free. In the alternative, I have a copy of the article, but it's pretty long to paste into a post, so if there's a better alternative, please let me know.
The more recent article is this one from the Journal of the National Cancer Institute:
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/11/773.full
and this is the semi-rebuttal:
http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/conte...18/1334.1.full
The research is being done, albeit slowly, but consensus is really lacking.
As for me, I have no love for green tea, so giving it up for chemo was no skin off my nose (in other words, I didn't have anything to give up, because all I've ever done with green is to occasionally mix it half and half with black). I've waffled about giving up L-Theanine extract, but it's not in the same class as the green tea antioxidants so I tell myself it's okay now and then.
I asked about carrot juice, which I had been drinking daily (4 ounces), and it was discouraged. I didn't ask about coffee, black tea and chocolate, all of which are pretty high in antioxidants, but I console myself that the studies I have read demonstrate that milk--which I add to all of the above--seems to neutralize, at least to a great extent, the antioxidants contained in each.
Most, but not all, foods (like my carrot juice) seem to get a pass under the theory that the antioxidant amounts in the normal diet are not great enough to cause a problem. I expect that for someone who craves green tea like I crave darjeeling, a cup or two is not an issue, but drinking it in excess for the purpose of helping things along may be counterproductive.
Bottom line is that I probably shouldn't have posted so definitively because I'm not the Shell Answer Man. (I blame the excessive steroids in my system for my over-abundant enthusiasm, because I'm mostly over it today, thank God.)
At the moment, I'm eating what I crave, and according to my food diary, it's not causing a problem with my nutrient intake (which is right at the midline, except for the B vitamins, which I continue to supplement), so I figure I can survive another eight weeks sans the ones the pharmacists banned. Feels kinda like a crapshoot, though, and I really miss n-acetyl-cysteine (which has the same uneven results as green tea).