The green tea & health connection constantly strengthens! It turns out the green tea just may be a powerful fatigue treatment. The magic ingredient that combats exhaustion and fatigue is the EGCG in tea concludes new research studies from Japan.
A Cruel Experiment: The health journal Nutrition reports that Japanese researchers provided oral intake of EGCG to rats in their study. In a cruel study (in my opinion) researchers truly stressed out their test rats by keeping their cages filled with 1.5 cm of water over a period of five days. To further stress the rats, they attached weights to the tails & they were forced to keep swimming with this added weight. Such a situation would stress any mammal!
These poor animals were given an liquid extract of green tea containing the EGCG as a fatigue treatment. Those rats given the EGCG could swim longer, with fewer physical effects, than those without the supplement.
Further, their stress levels were lower. The normal stress of a 'tough day' will disappear with rest, but accumulative stress can cause irreversible damage, so this news is definitely good.
Other green tea health benefits may be protection against excess weight, Alzheimers, cardiovascular damage and some cancers.
It's important to note that the rats were fed green tea/EGCG extract because, obviously, inviting the rats to afternoon tea wasn't practical. However, Mother Nature usually knows best and it has been proved repeatedly that removing a substance from its environment – in this case green tea extract – isn't as effective as the entire plant. I heartily recommend that we all drink organic green tea, rather than simply taking the extract.
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