Does Green Tea Help You Lose Weight?

E ven a basic search of scientific publications brings back a huge array of results for green tea and its weight loss properties. Wading through all of this there's some interesting patterns in the findings.

Green tea does appear to increase the level of fat oxidation in the human body more than can be explained by the caffeine content alone. In fact the caffeine content of green tea is quite low and yet its fat oxidation properties are higher than those of black tea which contains more caffeine. This property of green tea to burn fat in people is called thermogenesis and it means your body is expending more energy. More energy expenditure means weight loss.

Due to the complex mix of compounds in green tea its been very difficult to determine exactly what particular one is responsible for the fat burning effects. Its been narrowed down to a group of compounds known as phytochemicals. These are a type of plant-based chemical that provide many positive benefits to the human body. The studies into their cancer fighting properties are almost as numerous as those for weight loss.

Now although caffeine was ruled out as the cause of any weight loss in test subjects it has been found to boost the already potent thermogenic ability of green tea.

Here's where a secret of weight control using tea reveals itself. Green tea actually contains very low doses of caffeine so to get an extra boost of caffeine you should drink both green and black tea throughout the day. That way you're getting the higher levels of caffeine from the black tea but the high levels of green tea's phytochemicals boosting your metabolism too. You don't need to go to the extent of ruining your tea by mixing the two but drinking a black tea and green tea within 2 - 3 hours of each other will have a synergistic effect and increase the fat burning potential.

If you still have doubts about green teas weight loss potential then let me give you one final example. If you visit the Google Scholar search engine and do a search for green tea and weight loss then look at the results. You'll see over 60,000 results with the top 10 results all being scientific papers in respected journals that all conclude green teas fat burning properties. Can't get much more proof than that!

(Doug Bromley)