Green Tea Stress Buster, Exercise Enhancer, Weight Loss Aid

As if all of the health benefits of green tea consumption that we’ve already discussed weren’t enough to convince us to drink it, there are even more! We most often want lots of help with these big three benefits:

• Stress busting
• Increase exercise endurance
• Weight loss

Stress buster:

Of all of the life style changes that I coached my patients through, dealing with stress was the most difficult to conquer. After all our society continually places stress on us with its ads to do more, do more, do more, buy more, join this club, come to this event and on it goes. Then there are those relationship problems, probably the biggest stressors of all.

We’re very aware of the degenerative effects of stress which upsets our hormonal balance and contributes significantly to the diseases of our culture, heart disease, diabetes, low energy and more.

So during your busy stressful day, reach for a cup of decaffeinated green tea. Besides containing that amazing antioxidant ECGC, it contains another amazing little chemical we haven’t discussed yet, an amino acid known as L-theanine.

Found only in tea leaves and some wild mushrooms, L-theanine, according to scientific study, crosses the blood brain barrier and directly affects the central nervous system. It keeps the nerves from sending out stress signals to the rest of the body. So even though you may be getting stressful input, you don’t get stressful output that causes degeneration of your tissues.

And the double blessing of L-theanine in green tea: it reduces anxiety without causing drowsiness. It invigorates and calms at the same time. The third blessing: L-theanine helps our brains to function better too.

Exercise becomes a stressor when not performed properly or over done. But green tea increases exercise endurance, thus decreasing exercise stress.

Increases Exercise Endurance

Once again those amazing antioxidants in green tea speed up the muscle cells’ ability to absorb and burn fatty acids. Increased efficiency in burning fatty acids increases the exerciser’s endurance.

At the beginning of an exercise session the cells burn glucose, the form of sugar in the cells. But the glucose reserves in the muscles are very limited. So the muscle cells switch to fat as their fuel at some point in more prolonged exercise. Because the supply of fat in the body is usually abundant even in slim folks, we can exercise longer when we burn fat efficiently. Apparently green tea increases the efficiency of burning fats as a fuel by helping break down fat stores in the body more quickly.

But drinking one cup of green tea before starting the exercise won’t induce these changes to fat metabolism in the muscles. In the rat studies these rodents were fed green tea daily. It took 10 weeks to gradually increase the ability to exercise for longer periods of time.

And a 165-pound person would need to drink 4 cups of green tea per day to benefit from green tea’s ability to increase endurance.

This ability to burn fat more efficiently contributes to green tea’s affect on weight control.

Want to Burn Off that Belly Fat?

That’s just what green tea does – preferentially promotes the burning of fat surrounding the internal abdominal organs rather than the fat store in and around the muscles.

Mice fed green tea powder as 2% of their diet lost 76% of their belly fat in 16 weeks. In a human study men who drank a bottle of green tea containing 690 mg. of antioxidants (catechins) for a 12 week period lost weight, had smaller waists and less body and subcutaneous (under the skin) fat.

The anti-oxidants, L-theanine and caffeine in green tea all three contribute to this fat burning boost. Personally I still recommend drinking only decaffeinated green tea because of caffeine’s effect on upsetting body chemistry which leads to degenerative diseases.

Let’s have another cup of tea. We will wrap up the green tea review in the next article by looking at how to brew it, what to eat with it to increase its benefits, and discuss precautions and drug interactions.

For more details log into theses sites

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/health-benefits-of-green-tea

http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=146#healthbenefits

Blessings,

Dr. Jo