Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Green tea supplement: The Benefits of Adding Green Tea to Your Diet

Green tea supplement

You may have heard about supplementing your diet with green tea in order to lose weight. But in addition to losing weight, green tea users tout its other benefits such as lowering bad and increasing good cholesterol, lowering blood pressure and even fighting colon and bladder cancers. But other than carrying around a bunch of tea bags and hoping to find some boiling water, how can you get green tea into your diet? Most people have started turning to green tea extract supplements in pill form.

Besides their ease of use, supplements also take care of the complaints some people have when taking green tea in its more traditional brewed form. Those complains include the tea's somewhat bitter taste as well side effects from its caffeine content. One six-ounce cup of green tea contains approximately 30 mg. of caffeine, so people who are caffeine sensitive should take green tea supplements instead of brewed tea. In addition, more than six cups of green tea a day can lead to sleeplessness, irregular heart beat, diarrhea, vomiting, dizziness and headaches. Taken as a dietary supplement, green tea extract generally comes in 500 mg. capsules taken two or three times daily.

Green Tea is also widely recognized as one than can protect you against lots of different cancers such ovarian cancer, stomach cancer, prostate cancer, as well as cancer of the colon, mouth, breast and cervix. Advocates claim that a diet supplemented with green tea or a green tea extract in supplement form may actually delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease. One study from Great Britain found that green tea inhibited three chemical culprits associated with breaking down brain cells and producing plaque and protein deposits in the brain.

Although green tea has been considered a medicine for 4,000 in China, only recently has Western medicine recognized its curative properties. In 1994 an article was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute showed that a normal diet that included green tea could reduce the risks of cancer of the esophagus by up to 60%. The study found that compounds in green tea had a tendency to inhibit the growth of cancer cells along with reducing total cholesterol levels, increase the ratio of good cholesterol and decreasing the level of bad cholesterol.

Finally, according to research, green tea contains a substance known as L-theanine that triggers a body's T cells to secrete as much as ten-times their normal output of virus-battling interferon, so incorporating a green tea supplement into your diet may be a key flu-fighting strategy.

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