Green Tea A Good Tool for Weight Loss?

 

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Drinking green tea has numerous health benefits. It can lower cholesterol, enhance fat oxidation, and increase thermogenesis, which is the body’s rate of burning calories. Green tea is becoming a more popular form of weight loss as can be seen by the wide variety of supplement makers that are using it in their weight loss products.
Green tea extract is commonly being used to replace the caffeine component in many fat-burning supplements. Green tea provides more benefits than what caffeine would contribute. For example, it is a powerful antioxidant. Experts agree that the active ingredient epigallocatechin gallate, EGCG, is up to 200 times for potent than vitamin E as an oxidant

Green tea has also been useful in regulating glucose. This means it can slow the rise of blood sugar after a meal. It does this by slowing the action of a digestive enzyme called amylase. Amylase is a crucial component of breaking down starches or carbohydrates after a meal. Without that breakdown blood sugar levels can be very high after eating.

Furthermore, weight is gained as excess sugars and fats are stored in the body as fat cells. Green tea can help avoid storing extra pounds by restraining the movement of glucose in fat cells. EGCG is the green tea catechin that has been proven particularly effective in this area.

Green tea has been able to stimulate weight loss by increasing the metabolic weight and increasing the number of calories burned. If you’d like to take advantage of green tea in your weight loss program there are several ways to introduce it. You can purchase it in isolation. This is the easiest way to determine that any results experienced are due to the green tea itself and not something you combined it with.

Another way to introduce green tea into your weight loss plan is by buying a fat burner that contains green tea in its list of ingredients. There are plenty of popular products on the market that boast green tea as component of the supplement.

The simplest and most cost effective way to take advantage of the benefits of green tea is to drink it instead of coffee or regular tea. By doing his you can avoid costly pills and still enjoy the positive results of green tea.

There have been several studies that have investigated the validity of green tea as a weight loss supplement. In years past research has chiefly involved testing on animals, primarily mice. However, recently scientists have begun to study the effect on humans.

One test administered by the Linus Pauling Institute showed that drinking green tea extract resulted in an average increase in energy of the body of 3-4 percent. It was determined that this increase in energy was a result of increased fat oxidation and thermogenesis. Thermogenesis describes the energy used in heat production that is not related to resting metabolism or physical activity.

In a separate study people were given green tea while others were given caffeine to see how the two compared. The study indicated that the people who had taken the green tea had a higher thermogenesis than those that took the caffeine.

It should be mentioned that green tea usually does contain caffeine, but if necessary herbal preparations can be made without caffeine. This herbal supplement will provide the benefits of the catechins that produce thermogenesis in green tea without the effects of caffeine.

At this point there are no documented studies determining the long term effects of green tea on weight loss. However, experts suggest that combining green tea with a healthy diet and regular exercise routine will maximize results.