Health Bytes-q4-09

Heart disease

Tea

A joint Scots and French study published in the journal Food Chemistry has concluded that drinking tea can have an amazing preventative effect on fatty deposits in arteries – reducing fatty build-ups by up to 96% - if you are a hamster. The researchers from the University of Glasgow, and the University of Montpellier fed hamsters a high-fat diet for 12 weeks. Some were given the human equivalent of one cup of black or green tea or fruit as well

University of Glasgow professor Alan Crozier, who was one of the researchers, believes humans may also benefit from the findings.

"The amount they were given is about the equivalent to a human having a glass of fruit juice or a mug of tea a day - the dose is not massive: it is a nutritionally relevant dose," Crozier was quoted as saying in the Scotsman newspaper. "The hamsters were on a high-fat diet and you get signs of heart disease with the fatty streaks in the arteries after 12 weeks. One group was given just a high-fat diet and none of the juices and the teas. The results showed that in this group more than 20% of the artery wall was covered with fatty streaks. If you feed them the high-fat diet and a juice or tea, then there is a reduction in the fatty deposits, particularly so with the raspberry juice and green tea. But the others were very effective as well," Crozier said.

Smoking

Tea 

Rats that are fed extracts from Chinese green tea every day appear to show signs of slower damage from cigarette smoke.

Researchers led by Judith Mak of the University of Hong Kong discovered that while rats that inhaled cigarette smoke without the green tea extracts showed enlargement in the airspace in the lungs and an increase in the number of mucus-producing goblet cells, those fed with Lung Chen tea did not show the same effects.

"The precise mechanisms of the protective role of green tea against cigarette smoking-induced lung injury are currently unclear," according to a report in Respiratory Medicine. "Lung Chen tea contains the largest amount of EGCG when compared with other Chinese teas and EGCG has the highest antioxidant capacity among different catechins and dietary compounds such as vitamins C, E and black tea."

Read more

Pneumonia

Tea

When it comes to preventative effects of green tea on pneumonia, Japanese women appeared to benefit more than men in a recently concluded research program conducted by Ikue Watanabe and colleagues at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine in Sendai, Japan reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition

Japanese women that drink five or more cups of green tea a day cut the risk by 47%, but Japanese men apparently do not derive the same benefit.

For Japanese women, drinking even small amounts of green tea appears to give considerable benefit. Consuming one cup or less of green tea daily appears to reduce the risk of dying from pneumonia by 41%

Read more

Distress

Tea

A recent study conducted by Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan, reported in the September edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, has concluded that green tea consumption is linked to a decrease in psychological distress.

The researchers studied data gleaned from 42,093 Japanese citizens aged 40 and above.

The study was intended to discover whether there is in fact an inverse relationship between green tea consumption and psychological distress. It found that indeed the more cups of green tea a person drinks, the less stress is likely to affect them. Drinking five or more cups of green tea per day makes a person 80% less likely to suffer psychological distress than if they drank one cup or less.

Read more