The Health Benefits Of Green Tea

What is it about green tea anyway? You find green tea everywhere now, even for sale in commercial buses! This might not be unconnected to green tea’s wonderful health benefits. Recent research has shown that green tea drinkers appear to have lower risk for a wide range of diseases, from simple bacterial or viral infections to chronic degenerative conditions including cardiovascular disease, cancer, stroke, periodontal disease, and osteoporosis.

Green tea is particularly rich in health-promoting flavonoids, which account for 30 percent of the dry weight of a leaf, including catechins and their derivatives. The most abundant catechin in green tea is epigallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG), which is thought to play a major role in the green tea’s anticancer and antioxidant effects.

Just one cup of green tea supplies 20-35 mg of EGCG, which has the highest antioxidant activity of all the green tea catechins. The EGCG also protects the heart in patients with acute coronary heart disease as it helps prevent the death of heart muscle cells following ischemia and reperfusion injury.

When the arteries are blocked with fatty plagues, ischemia (the restriction in blood supply and therefore in oxygen and nutrients) results. When circulation is restored, oxidative damage occurs, and this is referred to as reperfusion injury.

Catechins, apart from being potent free radical scavengers, help thin the blood and prevent the formation of blood clots by preventing the formation of pro-inflammatory compounds derived from omega-6 fatty acids.  These pro-inflammatory compounds cause platelets to clump together. In effect green tea can help prevent blood clots.

As a result, the rate at which the body breaks down fats into triglycerides, and the rise of triglyceride levels in the bloodstream that occurs after eating, is greatly slowed. Owing to the fact that a large rise in blood levels of triglycerides after a meal is a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease, drinking green tea along with your meals is a good idea, especially if your triglyceride levels are higher than normal.

Green tea has also been shown to effectively lower risk of atherosclerosis by lowering LDL cholesterol, triglycerides, lipid peroxides and fibrinogen, a protein in the blood involved in the formation of blood clots while at the same improving the ratio of LDL (bad) to HDL (good) cholesterol. You just cannot go wrong with green tea!