Is it ok to drink plain, unsweetened tea while fasting before a cholesterol test?

Caffeine wakes up cholesterol.

I don’t know, but I would stick to water only. Your appointment is in the morning right? You’ll survive overnight without food or tea.

@JLeslie Yep. Normally I’d just sleep, but I’m working overnight and getting blood drawn in the morning. I’ve had nothing but plain green tea for the last few hours, so I need to decide whether to start counting the 12 from dinner or now.

My guess is probably for cholesterol it would barely have an effect. For sugars I would say don’t risk it. For me I would not risk it because I have very high cholesterol and I like the circumstance to be as perfect as possible.

Is the cholesterol test the only blood workup they are doing? I wouldn’t risk it. I’d drink only water. Anything else may change your blood chemistry. Take a thermos with you and have a cup after the tests.

@bkcunningham Cholesterol and thyroid. I guess I’ll wait a few extra hours just in case. Google has turned up conflicting answers.

Thanks, all!

Thyroid you don’t need to fast.

Well, I hope everything turns out fine on the tests in the morning. Just Fluther when you feel sleepy.

I guess it’s ok. After all it’s not a cholestearol test is it? Lol. Sorry. Goodluck! : )

At the doctors offices I worked at, it was water and black coffee (no sugar, no cream, etc) only; tea was not allowed. But, it’s… a bit of an inexact science, and I think the coffee was more that you can’t really take away coffee in the morning from Americans if you don’t want to have bigger problems (like violent fights breaking out in the waiting room, or everyone being hours late for their testing every day); the way it was framed to me always made me think they’d be saying “water and black tea only (no sugar, no cream)” if we lived in a country where tea was the dominant drink and not coffee. Either way, unless this is a big test and a few points could make a big difference for you, it’s probably going to be ok.

I think probably coffee is named, because coffee is what most Americans drink. Probably tea is basically the same. Coffee is certainly taken away for heart stress tests, even decaf is recommended to not be consumed, if my memory serves, before a stress test because it has traces of caffiene.