Why Green Tea?
Why choose green tea
For thousands of years, Asians have claimed that drinking green tea is good for your health, both mentally and physically. Only recently has science been able to investigate these claims by isolating components of green tea, and testing them in laboratory experiments.
Curiosity about the effects of green tea on human health was first aroused in the 1970s. Epidemiologists noticed that people living in the Shizouka Prefecture, an area in central Japan where green tea is grown and consumed in great quantities, had a much lower rate of death from stomach cancer, which was and still is the most prevalent form of cancer in Japan.
As scientists began to study the Shizouka Prefecture residents, they were surprised to discover that, not only did they die less often of stomach cancer, their death rates from all types of cancers were significantly lower.
Curious and excited, the scientists conducted exhaustive studies of the population. The only major difference they could find was the people who lived in the Prefecture drank significantly more green tea than people living in areas with higher rates of cancer.
Everybody drinks green tea in Japan. But they really drink increasingly greater amounts of green tea in the Shizouka Prefecture, since acres and acres of tea grow right there, practically in their backyard(s). This easy accessibility makes for almost continual sipping throughout the day. The water is always boiling, and just-picked green tea leaves are often added to the teapot to refresh the brew.
When studying black tea drinkers throughout the world, scientists didn't see the same dramatic cancer-protective effects as they found in Shizouka. “But why not,?” they wondered. What did green tea contain that black tea did not? The answer was clear -- more catechins, or EGCG, the antioxidant that is exclusive to green tea. Catechins make up as much as 30% of the dry weight of green tea leaves, but only 3-10% of black tea. So the scientists went back to their laboratories determined to prove (or disprove) the theory that the catechins in green tea were the miracle substance that could help prevent cancer.
In order to use the green tea leaf with maximum efficiency in tests, researchers used a scientific process to extract the catechins (antioxidants) and condense them to a powdered form. This extract could then be mixed with food or drinking water. Since the catechins, or antioxidants, were first isolated and tested, thousands of studies of their physiological effects have been conducted. The results have been nothing short of astounding. It was shown that green tea protects against many of the most dangerous and deadly diseases plaguing humankind today. And no matter how much green tea you drink, there are literally no side effects.