Is rooibos tea safe during pregnancy?

Nobody knows, because nobody has studied it. A PubMed search on 18 September 2026 for rooibos crossed with pregnancy returned six records, and not one is a study of rooibos consumption in pregnant women. Two are rat studies, one is a survey of what pregnant women drink, and the rest are unrelated. Anyone stating that rooibos is proven safe in pregnancy, or proven unsafe, is going beyond the published evidence. Ask your midwife or doctor.

How many cups of rooibos can I drink while pregnant?

There is no researched number for rooibos specifically, and the figures circulating online contradict each other. The only published figure from a health service is the NHS limit of no more than four cups a day of herbal tea generally. Separately, the largest human trial of rooibos had forty non-pregnant adults drink six cups a day for six weeks. Neither figure is advice about your pregnancy.

Does rooibos contain caffeine?

No. Rooibos is naturally caffeine-free, according to the South African National Biodiversity Institute. That is a fact about the composition of the leaf, and it is one of the few things about rooibos and pregnancy that can be stated without qualification.

Does rooibos affect iron absorption in pregnancy?

The one study that tested this was published in 1979 in the South African Medical Journal. Thirty healthy young men in three groups of ten drank rooibos, ordinary tea or boiled water after a measured dose of iron. Iron absorption was 7.25% after rooibos, 1.70% after ordinary tea and 9.34% after water: ordinary tea reduced absorption significantly and rooibos did not. No pregnant person was studied, and the study is nearly fifty years old.

Is flavoured rooibos safe in pregnancy?

With a flavoured or blended rooibos, the ingredient worth asking about is usually not the rooibos. A rooibos chai carries chai spices; a rooibos and senna blend carries senna, a stimulant laxative; a liquorice blend carries liquorice root, which the NHS names explicitly as one to avoid in pregnancy. Read the ingredients list rather than the name on the front, and take that list to your midwife.

Can rooibos tea cause a miscarriage?

There is no published evidence that it does, and there is also no study that could have detected it, because no trial of rooibos in human pregnancy exists. We can say that nothing in the literature reports it. We cannot say it has been ruled out, because it has not been tested.

Rooibos tea and pregnancy — what the research actually says

Q: What does the NHS say about rooibos in pregnancy?

Nothing. The NHS page on foods to avoid in pregnancy does not mention rooibos or redbush anywhere. What it does say is to avoid drinking more than four cups a day of any herbal tea, to avoid teas containing liquorice root, and to keep caffeine under 200 mg a day. Rooibos is a herbal tea, so the four-cup limit is the closest thing to NHS guidance that exists for it.

I — The evidence

What research on rooibos and pregnancy exists

On 18 September 2026 we searched PubMed — the US National Library of Medicine's index of biomedical literature — for rooibos crossed with pregnancy, gestation, foetal, maternal, lactation and breast milk. The search returned six records in total. You can run it yourself; the terms are printed below this section.

Six is a small number for a plant drunk in fifty countries. What matters more is what the six are.

Two are rat studies, both from the same laboratory at Brock University in Canada, both about bone. In the first, female rats drank red rooibos from before conception until the end of weaning; it did not change bone development in their offspring. In the second, rooibos helped mother rats partially recover the bone density that pregnancy and nursing had cost them — though not back to the level of rats that never bore a litter.

Both used about 2 600 mg of rooibos per kilogram of body weight per day. That is a supplemental dose chosen to produce an effect in a rodent, and it does not translate to cups of tea. We are not going to convert it for you, because the conversion between species is not a straight ratio and anyone who prints one is guessing.

One counts what pregnant women drink. A 2025 survey in Catalonia found rooibos was the fourth most-consumed herbal product among pregnant and postpartum women, at 6% — behind ginger at 28%, chamomile at 9% and thyme at 7%. That tells you rooibos is common in pregnancy. It says nothing whatsoever about whether it is safe.

One is about breastfeeding attitudes among informal workers in India and South Africa, where rooibos appears as one of the non-nutritive fluids mothers reach for when they return to work. One is a cell-culture study of drug-metabolising enzymes. One has no pregnancy content at all and surfaced on an indexing term.

So: no trial. No cohort. No case-control study. Not one piece of evidence about what happens when a pregnant human being drinks rooibos.

The six, in one line each

Rat bone, 2023
maternal rooibos changed nothing in offspring
Rat bone, 2021
partial maternal recovery, n=42
Survey, 2025
6% of pregnant women in Catalonia
Breastfeeding, 2020
rooibos as a non-nutritive fluid
Cell culture, 2024
no significant enzyme inhibition
Muscle cells, 2013
not about pregnancy at all

Search run against the NCBI E-utilities API, 18 September 2026, terms:

(rooibos OR "Aspalathus linearis") AND (pregnancy OR pregnant OR gestation OR fetal OR foetal OR maternal OR lactation OR breastfeeding OR "breast milk")

. The six records are PMIDs 40781711, 38580936, 32503486, 37180851, 23639187 and 34950693. Absence of a study in the index we searched is not proof that none exists anywhere.

II — The check

A citation that gets repeated everywhere, and is not real

Search for rooibos and pregnancy and you will meet a sentence along these lines: a 2018 review in the Journal of Food Science found no adverse effects associated with moderate rooibos consumption during pregnancy. It appears on health sites and in the summaries search engines assemble from them.

We went looking for that paper and it does not exist.

PubMed indexes five rooibos papers in the Journal of Food Science. They are: a 2024 study of a rooibos polysaccharide in acute alcoholic liver injury; a 2013 study of xanthine oxidase inhibition by aspalathin; a 2026 review of South African herbal teas and mitochondrial dysfunction in diabetes; a 2017 study of vitamin D fortification and Saskatoon berry syrup in rooibos; and a 2014 study of rooibos as a control on Clostridium perfringens in ready-to-eat pig's trotters.

None of them is about pregnancy. A separate search for any rooibos paper published in 2018 mentioning pregnancy returns nothing at all.

What we are and are not saying

We are not saying rooibos is unsafe. We are saying that a specific reassurance, repeated across the pages that rank for this question, rests on a source that is not in the literature. If you have been reassured by that sentence, the reassurance was not evidence.

If the paper exists somewhere we could not reach, we will correct this page and say so. Send it to us.

Searches run 18 September 2026: rooibos AND "Journal of Food Science"[jour] returned five records, none on pregnancy; rooibos AND 2018[dp] AND pregnancy returned zero.

III — The authorities

What the health services actually say

People append an institution's name to this search — rooibos pregnancy nhs is a real, suggested query, and so is the Mayo Clinic version. They are looking for an authority rather than a tea shop. Here is what those authorities have published.

Source	Does it mention rooibos?	What it does say
NHS, Foods to avoid in pregnancy	No	Avoid more than four cups of herbal tea a day; avoid teas containing liquorice root; keep caffeine under 200 mg a day
MotherToBaby (OTIS), Herbal Products fact sheet	No	Names berberine, capsaicin, echinacea, ginger, melatonin and St John's wort. States that most herbal products have not been well studied in pregnancy
LactMed, the NIH Drugs and Lactation Database	No entry	Has entries for raspberry, vervain, hibiscus, fenugreek, fennel and goat's rue. Not for rooibos

That is the honest answer to what does the NHS say about rooibos in pregnancy: nothing. It has not assessed it. What it has published is a general limit on herbal tea, and rooibos is a herbal tea, so that limit is the closest thing to guidance that exists from a health service.

Note what the NHS line is and is not. Four cups a day is a ceiling on herbal infusions generally, set because most of them are not well studied. It is not a finding about rooibos, and it is not permission.

Better than us on this

NHS — Foods to avoid in pregnancyThe herbal tea limit and the caffeine limit, first-hand
MotherToBaby — Herbal ProductsA free teratogen information service. They answer questions by phone and text

Both pages read 18 September 2026. LactMed checked through the NCBI Books index the same day. Health services revise their pages; if one of them publishes a rooibos position, this table is wrong and we want to know.

IV — The other side

The laboratory evidence nobody on this subject quotes

If the confident reassurance is unearned, so is confident alarm. But there is published work that sits awkwardly beside “the safest tea in pregnancy”, and none of the pages making that claim mentions it.

Rooibos contains compounds that act on oestrogen receptors

A 2006 study at the University of Shizuoka isolated twenty-five compounds from rooibos leaves and tested each for oestrogenic activity. Three of them showed it. The paper's title is simply Phytoestrogens from Aspalathus linearis.

Plant compounds with weak oestrogenic activity are in a great many foods, soya being the obvious one, and their presence is not a finding of harm. It is, though, a reason that “rooibos is just a caffeine-free infusion, so there is nothing to think about” is not right either.

Rooibos suppressed adrenal steroid production in human cells

Work at Stellenbosch University tested rooibos and two of its signature compounds, aspalathin and nothofagin, on H295R cells — a human adrenal cell line. Under stimulated conditions, rooibos cut total steroid output roughly fourfold, with significant reductions in the precursors of aldosterone and cortisol.

That is cells in a dish, at concentrations the researchers chose. It is not a person drinking tea. It is also not nothing, and pregnancy is a state in which steroid hormones do a great deal of work.

Rooibos suppressed ovarian cell function in vitro

A 2023 study on pig ovarian granulosa cells found rooibos extract reduced markers of cell proliferation, increased markers of cell death, and blunted the cells' response to follicle-stimulating hormone. The authors' own conclusion is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: the potential anti-reproductive effects of rooibos and its constituent quercetin, they write, should be taken into account in animal and human nutrition.

Again: pig cells, in a dish. The same research group's 2022 review of this area says plainly that the evidence is limited and further study is required. We report it because a reader searching rooibos and fertility deserves to know it was published, not because it tells them what to do.

One finding we are deliberately not making more of

In 2010, seventeen healthy volunteers drank a single 400 ml serving of rooibos and their blood ACE activity fell measurably at thirty and sixty minutes. ACE-inhibitor drugs are contraindicated in pregnancy, and it would be easy to join those two facts into a scare.

They do not join. A brief change in an enzyme measurement in seventeen people is not a drug, and nobody has studied whether it means anything at all in pregnancy. Overstating this would be the same failure as the reassurance we criticised above, pointed the other way.

Oestrogenic compounds: Shimamura N et al., Biol Pharm Bull 2006;29(6):1271–4. Adrenal steroidogenesis: Schloms L et al., J Steroid Biochem Mol Biol 2012;128:128–38. Ovarian cells: Sirotkin AV et al., Physiol Res 2023;72(2):269–280, and the review at J Anim Physiol Anim Nutr 2022;106(5):995–999. ACE: Persson IA et al., Public Health Nutr 2010;13(5):730–7.

V — The dose question

How many cups — and why we will not give you a number

Page after page answers this. One to two cups. One to three cups. Up to four. Several of them attribute their figure to the NHS, and they cannot all be right, because the NHS has published exactly one number and it is not about rooibos.

We are not going to add a number of our own. Inventing a threshold that sounds medical is the thing this page exists to argue against, and we are not a health service.

What we can give you is the two real figures and where they come from:

Four cups of herbal tea a day is the ceiling the NHS publishes for herbal tea generally in pregnancy. Rooibos is a herbal tea. That is the nearest thing to guidance that exists.
Six cups a day for six weeks is what forty non-pregnant adults at cardiovascular risk drank in the one decent human trial of rooibos, in 2011. Nobody in that study was pregnant, and it was not a safety trial. It tells you that six cups a day has been done, under supervision, in adults, without the researchers reporting harm — and that is all it tells you.

NHS herbal tea limit as cited above. Marnewick JL et al., J Ethnopharmacol 2011;133(1):46–52.

VI — The practical point

With a flavoured rooibos, rooibos is usually not the question

People search for vanilla rooibos in pregnancy, rooibos chai, peach rooibos, rooibos with chamomile, rooibos with buchu, rooibos with senna. In almost all of those, the ingredient worth asking about is the other one.

A rooibos chai carries the spices of a chai. A rooibos and senna blend carries senna, which is a stimulant laxative. A rooibos and liquorice blend carries liquorice root, and liquorice root is the one herbal ingredient the NHS names explicitly as one to avoid in pregnancy. The word on the front of the box is rooibos; the thing your midwife will want to know about is on the back.

So the useful habit is boring and it is the one nobody mentions: read the ingredients list, not the name, and take that list to the appointment rather than the brand.

On the two forms of plain rooibos: green rooibos is the same leaf as red rooibos without the oxidation step, so it is the same plant, and there is no separate body of pregnancy evidence for either. What green rooibos is.

Liquorice root named by the NHS at the page cited above. Green and red rooibos as the same leaf: SANBI PlantZAfrica and the SA Rooibos Council, both sourced on the green rooibos page.

VII — What to do

What to take to your midwife or doctor

This page is not medical advice and we are not qualified to give any. What it can do is make your appointment more useful than “is rooibos okay?”, which invites a shrug.

Bring the actual product. The ingredients list settles most of this in ten seconds.
Say how much and how often. Two cups a week and eight cups a day are different questions.
Mention every medicine you take. The one documented human safety signal for rooibos involves the liver, and at least one report involves rooibos taken alongside a prescription drug. What is actually documented.
Say if you are managing a hormone-sensitive condition, or are in fertility treatment. That is where the laboratory work above is worth a doctor's judgement rather than ours.

Who we are

We are an independent guide to the region where rooibos grows. Nobody here is a doctor, a midwife, a dietitian or a pharmacologist, and nothing on this page is a recommendation to drink rooibos or to avoid it. We report published research, name it, and link it so you can check us. How this site works.

All the evidence pagesWhat has actually been tested in humans, and what has not. Breastfeeding and babiesA separate question, with a separate and more consequential answer. The plant and the placeWhat rooibos is, why it grows only here, and how it is made.