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Powerful properties of Green Tea
All the properties of green tea work in a perfect symphony together to bring you truly great health benefits. Although there are many properties, I will only be mentioning the major and exciting ones here. Check back later, and I will be adding more. As I mentioned previously, loose leaf Green Tea gives you All the benefits that green tea has to offer. While steeping the rolled loose leaves, they expand, exposing more surface area to the warm water, allowing more of the beneficial properties to be extracted. Of the few properties of green tea that I will be briefly mentioning here, I am going to start with the most exciting, highly studied, cancer preventing epigallocatechin gallate. More commonly and easily known as EGCG.
Health Benefits of Epigallocatechin Gallate (EGCG)
EGCG is an antioxidant found mainly in the tea plant, especially the green tea variety. Yup, the loose leaves are better :-)Black and Wu long (Oolong) teas are fermented or oxidized which converts some properties to others. EGCG is converted to theaflavin and thearubigen.
The Caffeine in Green Tea is Good for YouCaffeine can do your body a world of good. But like most things, don’t overdo it. Caffeine, second in my list of the properties of green tea. The good benefits include:
Too much caffeine can reduce bone density. An interesting fact that I found out while researching for this page, which completely took me by surprise, was that caffeine is in actual fact toxic for animals like dogs and horses. This toxicity does not carry though to humans, so we are safe.
Flavonoids
Flavonoids in green tea, like EGCG have anti-oxidant properties, but are quite different to EGCG in that the flavonoids have a more anti-inflammatory, anti-allergic and anti-viral effects. Flavonoids can be found in several foods including red wine. The flavonoids in green tea help reduce blood cholesterol, relieve hay fever, eczema, sinusitis and asthma.Flavonoids are partly responsible for the coloring in fruit, veggies and some herbs.
Fluoride
Yup, this is the same fluoride that has been forced into your mouths by your parents, dentists and teachers. Not much of an introduction needed here, so we will just recap what you already know.Fluoride is good for preventing, and sometimes reversing early stages of tooth decay. This is achieved in two ways:
Tooth decay is caused my plaque build up on your teeth, which reacts with sugars in food creating a harmful acid that dissolves the protective enamel skin on your teeth.
Chlorophyll
Here’s another one of the properties of green tea that we learned in school. The conversion of light to energy. And was it energy to oxygen at night?Clorophyll is responsible for the green pigmentation in the green tea leaves. It is vital for photosynthesis – which is what happens when the leaves convert light into energy or food for the tea plant. Green tea leaves are selective of the wavelength of light that it uses to convert to energy, which is what makes the molecules in the leaf turn green. There is a whole scientific reason behind this one. Choropyll is an active deodorizer which helps fight bad breath, and it also helps neutralize some of the pollution that we breathe. The bad news is that chlorophyll is reduced when your green tea is steeped. So to get the most chlorophyll, use the Japanese Gyokuro or Matcha teas. These plants are covered in shade a couple of weeks before picking which concentrates the chlorophyll in the leaves.
L-Theanine
L-Theanine is a unique amino acid that is found only in the tea plant, and some types of mushroom. This is one of the properties of green tea that provide the savory taste.L-Theanine has the effect of relieving stress and inducing a relaxed state without causing drowsiness. This property also promotes the generation of alpha brain waves, which is the state of increased attention and concentration. Some cosmetics use L-Theanine to provide an effective moisturizer for the skin.
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