Tea Studies - Green Tea
For more than 4000 years and Chinese medicine men used green tea to cure almost all the common illnesses including body ache, headaches, and poor digestion. Green tea extracts are rich in antioxidants which in turn help in fighting the free radicals in the body, which usually are causes for cancer in a human body. Green Tea protects the digestive and respiratory systems from serious infections; it is also a known fact. Green Tea is known to help lower blood cholesterol levels and also blocks all the carcinogens which promote cancer. But all these have not been documented and only very recently research had begun into the actual benefits derived from Green Tea and a number of Studies and research projects have been done on the subject of Green Tea.
In 1987 the first serious and documented research came, this is when everybody heard of its curative value from a examiner of National Cancer Institute who was thrilled by new studies asserted that EGCG blocked the cancer in human body.
Researcher Tomonori Nagao of Health Care Products Research Laboratories in Tokyo In one of such studies conducted by him showed that people who drank a bottle of tea with green tea extract every day for three months lost more body fat than those who drank a bottle of regular tea. Researchers say the results indicate that substances called catechins found in green tea known to may have well triggered weight loss by stimulating the body to burn more calories and thus decreasing the body fat.
In a similar study it has been proved that most of the teas contain large amount of polyphenols, which are basically the derivates of a plant based substances that have been known to have anticancer, antioxidant and antiviral qualities. When it comes to green tea, it has been found to be very loaded in catechins one particular type of polyphenols. These substances (catechins) are known to have anticancer and anti-inflammatory properties, but recent research done on the animals does confirm that catechins can also act on the fatty deposits and cholesterol levels.
To find the helpfulness of catechins study was conducted to find the effect in dropping the fat researchers looked have choose a set of 35 Japanese males at the effects, all of them with similar weights base on the waist sizes and BMI (body mass index).
These groups of men were split into 2 groups separately and for three months the group first drank a bottle of normal tea without the extract and the second group drank a bottle of normal tea fortified with green tea extract. In this period of three months the groups were taking same quantity of fat and calories, also not to miss to mention the group ate same food, so overall the food intake for all the 35 men was same. After the three months period, the reading showed that the group of men who had drank green tea extract lost 5.3 pounds and also reduced the waist size and the amount of the total body fat present in their bodies. This research on these groups has proven beyond doubt that the catechins present in green tea would positively reduce the weight.
