Health Benefits Of Green Tea Still Awesome, Study Shows
More and more news on the health benefits of green tea keep pouring in. The latest comes from Japanese researchers published in the journal Chinese Medicine.
They did what’s called a literature review, which is what it sounds like. Rather than set up a specific experiment and generate new data, the researchers instead sift through many, many other research papers and try to use the sum of that data to achieve some new insights.
These are tricky to do, more tricky than you might think. The main thing is, what studies do you include in your review? If you go cherry-picking this article you like here, that article you like there, you may end up biasing your results significantly.
At the same time, there’s a lot of junk science out there, my friends. You can’t take every article, because some are just crap (here’s an example of a bad study on fish oils) and will skew your results in an inaccurate direction. So it can be a bit of a delicate dance.
Health Benefits Of Green Tea
So what did the researchers find? Well, after selecting 105 articles to go through, the researchers reported:
- There are very potent antioxidants in green tea called catechins that strongly contribute to the overall antioxidant network in the body. Catechins keep coming up over and over again in the study, and if you read much at all about green tea, you’re going to keep coming across the word “catechins”. This antioxidant effect is actually measurable in the blood plasma (by reducing signs of oxidative stress). For more on how antioxidants actually work, find out how blueberries will take a bullet for you.
- Going back to catechins, there’s some evidence that they help prevent degenerative diseases of various kinds, including cardiovascular diseases like hypertension and coronary heart disease (clogged arteries). For more on this, read this article on antioxidants and arteries. Trigycleride levels are also reduced when green tea extracts are used.
- Green tea and extracts of green tea like EGCG can help with obesity. It’s possible that this is due to an increase in thermogenesis (creation of body heat), or it could be due to more optimized use of glucose.
- Which leads us to the health benefits of green tea for diabetics. Green tea and it’s extracts seem to help in glucose metabolism… there is a measurable reduction of glucose levels in the presence of green tea anitoxidants.
- Various anti-fungal and anti-viral (including influenza) benefits were found, including Candida Albicans specifically .
- How about bone density? There’s evidence green tea can help with increased bone mineralization (density), which makes sense considering this study on how green tea helps your teeth (actually, it helps reinforce that study quite a bit).
In short, green tea is pretty amazing stuff. A lot of the benefits can be attributed to the strong antioxidant properties found in green tea, but there seems to be a lot more to it than that. As much as we know, there’s still a long way to go to understand exactly how this stuff is so darn good for us.
By the way, green tea is actually rather low in caffiene. Ounce for ounce, it has about one-fifth the caffiene content of a cup of coffee. Which is good for me, because too much caffiene makes my heart explode out of my chest.
Fire down some green tea and stay healthy!