Benefits of Drinking Green Tea and Weight Loss - Is There Scientific Evidence to Support the Claims?

There are literally an unlimited number of benefits of drinking Green Tea. Although this drink has begun gaining popularity in Europe and America only in the last decade or so, it has been widely used in the oriental world for 1000s of years. They used it for simple things like wound healing and controlling bleeding traditionally. In the modern era, benefits of drinking green tea extend to issues on weight loss, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, liver disease, atherosclerosis, LDL cholesterol, inflammatory bowel disease, tooth decay and halitosis (bad breath). Before probing into 'hard core' health benefits of green teas, let's see what this tea actually is and why it is considered especially beneficial compared to other teas.
There are different classifications for tea: black, green and white is one type of a classification. However all of these teas are essentially processed from the same plant Camellia sinensis. The differences are due to the method of processing.
Why GREEN and not black or white?

The leaves of Camellia sinensis, undergoes minimal oxidation during the production of green version of the tea compared to black tea. Making black tea involves fermenting tea leaves while making the green version of the  tea involves steaming of tea leaves. Steaming helps preserve all the useful chemicals that naturally occur in tea leaves and thus the potent health benefits of green hearbal tea extract compared to other teas. Just think about the changes that would be caused by fermentation vs steaming of milk that result in 'warm milk' and yogurt! Wu Yi, Longjing, Hui Ming, Long Ding, and Hua Ding are a few of the many varieties of this healthy tea.
Green tea and weight loss
Research at Birmingham University, England, UK showed that ingestion of this herbal extract boosted fat oxidation by 17% on average compared to a placebo. This study also indicated that it improves insulin sensitivity and glucose tolerance as well.
Another publication in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in January 2005 indicates that "Daily consumption of tea containing 690mg catechins for 12 weeks reduced body fat, which suggests that the ingestion of catechins might be useful in the prevention and improvement of lifestyle-related diseases, mainly obesity."
A third study published in the same journal, but in December 1999 suggested that "Green teas have thermogenic properties and promotes fat oxidation beyond that explained by its caffeine content per se. The extract may play a role in the control of body composition via sympathetic activation of thermogenesis, fat oxidation, or both." These results complement the findings from Birmingham University.
As you can see, the benefits of drinking green tea are enormous. The western world has learned about them only recently and have begun to scientifically research each aspect of it. Although most of these still remain observations they are slowly and steadily being scientifically proven.
To get loads of information on Benefits of Drinking Green Tea especially with regard to weight loss you want to visit http://www.newhealthfacts.com/green-tea/benefits-of-drinking-green-tea.html


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