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Health

Green tea helps combat obesity, inflammation: Study

March 14, 2019 04:49 PM

Punjab News Express
NEW YORK: Want to cut that extra flab? Drinking green tea can help reduce obesity as well as inflammation in the gut, finds a study.

The findings, published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry, showed that mice fed a high-fat diet supplemented with green tea gained about 20 per cent less weight and had lower insulin resistance than mice fed an otherwise identical diet without tea.

Mice fed a diet of two per cent green tea extract had an improved gut health including more beneficial microbes in the intestines and less permeability in the intestinal wall -- a condition called "leaky gut" -- than those that ate a diet without it.

Leaky gut is a problem in humans that contributes to widespread low-grade inflammation.

"This study provides evidence that green tea encourages the growth of good gut bacteria, and that leads to a series of benefits that significantly lower the risk of obesity, " said lead author Richard Bruno, Professor at the Ohio State University.

For eight weeks, the team fed half of the male mice a high-fat diet that causes obesity and half were fed a regular diet. In each of those groups, half ate green tea extract mixed with their food.

Female mice were not included as they are resistant to diet-induced obesity and insulin resistance.

Green tea also protected against the movement of endotoxin -- the toxic bacterial component -- out of their guts and into the bloodstream.

"Consuming a little throughout the course of a day with food might be better, " Bruno said.

Drinking green tea has also been linked to a lower risk of cancer, heart and liver disease.

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