4 powerful new
uses for green tea

If you're not drinking tea every day, I just found two new studies that give even more reasons to make it a priority. I've told you in the past how tea can help prevent colon cancer, reduce inflammation, improve your memory, and even lower your cholesterol. But these two studies show tea's protection goes a lot further.

In the first study, researchers found that drinking green or black tea every day may prevent ischemic stroke. Three or more cups per day reduced the risk by 21% in a meta analysis. While this type of study is not as good as a randomized, prospective clinical study, it supports everything else we know about the flavonoids in tea.

The second meta-analysis found green tea (two cups per day) may reduce the risk of lung cancer by 18%.

As for green tea's ability to fight inflammation, the third study I found says this applies to your gums as well. That means it can fight periodontal disease. Gum disease is simply inflammation in your gums that leads to bleeding, deep gum pockets around your teeth, loose teeth, and infection. A Japanese study found that every one-cup-per-day increase in green tea intake decreases gum-pocket depth, average clinical attachment loss, and bleeding on probing. Here I would recommend the tea itself to bathe the tissues in its powerful phytochemicals.

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The fourth study followed 20 obese men. They took 300 mg of ECGC, the catechin found in green tea, every day. Compared to a placebo group, the ECGC stimulated fat oxidation, the process by which you burn off fat.

Tea is simply loaded with beneficial plant chemicals. The leaves use these chemicals to protect themselves from the sun. These chemicals are extraordinarily helpful in reducing inflammation in your body.

Regarding green tea specifically, a mentor of mine pointed out that the nature of the flavonoids in green tea cause them to act as a beneficial antioxidant in normal cells, but as a pro-oxidant in cancer cells. That's because of a deranged metabolism in the cancer cell. This process may explain the killing effect it has on cancer.

I suggest you drink two to three cups of green tea daily. As an alternative, you can also take Advanced Bionutritionals' outstanding green tea capsule supplement. One capsule contains 750 mg of green tea, the amount needed to burn fat in the fourth study. This dose is equivalent in power to 10 cups of green tea. It is the product I use when I'm not drinking green tea.

To protect your gums from periodontal disease, I recommend the tea itself. It can bathe the tissues in its powerful phytochemicals. This delivers the nutrients right where you need them.

Ref: Stroke, 2009 Feb 19; Lung Cancer, 2009 Jan 5; J Periodontol, 2009; 80(3); Eur J Clin Nutr, 2010 April 7.