Tea is one of the most popular beverages worldwide. Beyond its role as a daily food, it also possesses valuable medicinal properties, exemplifying the traditional concept of its dual identity as both food and medicine. Tea polyphenols (TPs), the primary bioactive components in tea leaves, have attracted widespread attention due to their remarkable antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer properties. Colorectal cancer (CRC), one of the malignancies with the highest global incidence and mortality rates, urgently requires novel therapeutic strategies to overcome drug resistance and toxic side effects associated with conventional treatments. This review systematically deciphers the diverse pharmacological effects of TPs, as well as their core mechanisms of inhibiting tumor proliferation and inducing apoptosis through targeting signaling pathways such as MAPK/PI3K-Akt. It further unveils their synergistic anticancer potential via gut microbiota modulation and epigenetic modifications, offering new strategies to address clinical drug resistance. Future studies are expected to enhance the bioavailability and clinical translational potential of TPs through optimized dosing, nanotechnology-based delivery systems, and chemical modifications. The anticancer potential of TPs validates the viability of the food-medicine continuum, pioneering novel pathways for cancer therapeutics.
Xiong et al. (Wed,) studied this question.