Do You Know About These Green Tea Health Benefits?

Green tea benefits the heart, the circulatory system, the brain, the metabolism, the digestive system and, because of its antioxidant content, all of the cells of the body. Are green tea health benefits overstated? In some cases, the answer is “yes”.

Green tea benefits were first examined because of something called the “Japanese paradox”. It’s a little like the French paradox. Most health experts believe that people who consume large amounts of dietary fat and/or smoke cigarettes are more likely to develop heart disease and cancer. But the incidence of heart disease is low in the French, even though the traditional diet is high in fat. The incidence of heart disease, as well as stomach and throat cancer is low in the Japanese, even among smokers.

After several studies, researchers stated that one of the possible green tea health benefits was a reduced risk of stomach and throat cancer, primarily because the study participants drank a liter or more of green tea every day. After studying French populations, researchers found an antioxidant in red wine called resveratrol. They said that the antioxidant may reduce the risk of heart disease, among other things.

If we combine green tea health benefits with those of resveratrol, we might be able to lengthen our life-spans. Researchers arrived at this conclusion after feeding resveratrol to fish that normally lived for only nine weeks. After dosing a group of the fish with resveratrol, they lived an average of 56% longer than the group that did not receive the supplement. Of course, whether it has the same effect on humans remains to be seen.

If you really want to lengthen your lifespan, you need more than antioxidants. They are a good place to start, because they fight free radical damage, but they do nothing to counter glycation, a complex process caused by sugar molecules binding to protein within the human body. This binding causes a cascade of reactions that lead to the formation of advance glycation end-products or AGEs. The term AGE is appropriate, because these molecules have been implicated in Alzheimer’s, type II diabetes, heart disease, deafness, blindness, cancer and other “age” related diseases. [Read more…]

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The Green tea health benefits

idealized curves of human blood glucose and in...

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Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)

Green tea may help reduce inflammation associated with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, the two types of IBD. If green tea proves to be helpful for preventing colon cancer, this would be an added benefit for those with IBD because they are at risk for colon cancer.

Diabetes

Green tea has been used traditionally to control blood sugar in the body. Animal studies suggest that green tea may help prevent the development of type 1 diabetes and slow the progression once it has developed. People with type 1 diabetes produce little or no insulin, a hormone that converts glucose (sugar), starches, and other foods into energy needed for daily life. Green tea may help regulate glucose in the body.

A few small clinical studies have found that daily supplementation of the diet with green tea-extract powder lowered the hemoglobin A1c level in individuals with borderline diabetes.

Liver disease

Population-based clinical studies have shown that men who drink more than 10 cups of green tea per day are less likely to develop disorders of the liver. Green tea also seems to protect the liver from the damaging effects of toxic substances such as alcohol. Animal studies have shown that green tea helps protect against the development of liver tumors in mice.

Results from several animal and human studies suggest that one of the polyphenols present in green tea, known as catechin, may help treat viral hepatitis (inflammation of the liver from a virus). In these studies, catechin was isolated from green tea and used in very high concentrations. It is not clear whether green tea (which contains a lower concentration of catechins) confers these same benefits to people with hepatitis. [Read more…]

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