If the calculations that Dutch scientists made are correct, you burn more than 5 grams of fat extra for every cup of green tea you drink, according to a meta-analysis published by Rick Hursel in Obesity Reviews.
Green tea & weight loss
Westerners who want to speed up their weight loss have been using green-tea extracts since the 1990s. That’s not so surprising: a 200-ml cup of green tea contains 30 mg of caffeine to start with. Caffeine raises the concentration of pep hormones like noradrenalin in your body, and helps cells to react better to the hormones. As a result fat cells release their content faster into the bloodstream and the energy expenditure of the muscles and organs rises.
Green tea also contains catechins, which reinforce the effect of caffeine. Catechins, for example, inhibit the enzyme COMT, which normally breaks down pep hormones. And catechins also activate hormone-sensitive lipase in the cells. This is an enzyme that cuts up fats in free fatty acids. More active hormone-sensitive lipase therefore means more fat burning.
An attractive sounding theory. But does the theory hold water too? This is the question that Hursel wanted to answer in his meta-study.
Study
Hursel collected 39 previously published studies on mixtures of catechins and caffeine. Six of these were suitable for use. The figure below is a summary of the results in those studies.
Results
The extent to which green-tea extracts boost the fat burning varies from study to study, Hursel discovered. This is probably because indigenous Europeans, more often than Asians, produce a version of the COMT enzyme that can withstand sabotage by catechins, and Europeans are used as European subjects in many studies. Nevertheless, green-tea extracts boosted energy expenditure in the average studies by about 4.7 percent.
Hursel was even able to calculate how much extra fat your burn if you take a green-tea supplement: every mg of a mixture of caffeine and green-tea catechins boosted the amount of fat burnt daily by 0.02 g. Hursel also calculated that every milligram of pure caffeine boosts fat burning by 0.01 g per day.
The table below shows a breakdown of the substances in 100 ml of green tea. We found the table in a database of the US Department of Agriculture.
A 200-ml cup of green tea contains not only 30 mg caffeine, but also 253 mg catechins. Together that’s 283 mg. Times 0.02 is 5.7. Drum roll….
Conclusion
So every cup of green tea you drink boosts your fat burning by 5.7 g. If you drink three cups of green tea every day for a year, that adds up to 6.2 kg fat. And that’s about 8 kg of body fat. Now that’s worthwhile.
The effects of catechin rich teas and caffeine on energy expenditure and fat oxidation: a meta-analysis.
Abstract
Different outcomes of the effect of catechin-caffeine mixtures and caffeine-only supplementation on energy expenditure and fat oxidation have been reported in short-term studies. Therefore, a meta-analysis was conducted to elucidate whether catechin-caffeine mixtures and caffeine-only supplementation indeed increase thermogenesis and fat oxidation. First, English-language studies measuring daily energy expenditure and fat oxidation by means of respiration chambers after catechin-caffeine mixtures and caffeine-only supplementation were identified through PubMed. Six articles encompassing a total of 18 different conditions fitted the inclusion criteria. Second, results were aggregated using random/mixed-effects models and expressed in terms of the mean difference in 24 h energy expenditure and fat oxidation between the treatment and placebo conditions. Finally, the influence of moderators such as BMI and dosage on the results was examined as well. The catechin-caffeine mixtures and caffeine-only supplementation increased energy expenditure significantly over 24 h (428.0 kJ (4.7%); P < 0.001 and 429.1 kJ (4.8%); P < 0.001, respectively). However, 24 h fat oxidation was only increased by catechin-caffeine mixtures (12.2 g (16.0%); P < 0.02 and 9.5 g (12.4%); P = 0.11, respectively). A dose-response effect on 24 h energy expenditure and fat oxidation occurred with a mean increase of 0.53 kJ mg(-1) (P < 0.01) and 0.02 g mg(-1) (P < 0.05) for catechin-caffeine mixtures and 0.44 kJ mg(-1) (P < 0.001) and 0.01 g mg(-1) (P < 0.05) for caffeine-only. In conclusion, catechin-caffeine mixtures or a caffeine-only supplementation stimulates daily energy expenditure dose-dependently by 0.4-0.5 kJ mg(-1) administered. Compared with placebo, daily fat-oxidation was only significantly increased after catechin-caffeine mixtures ingestion. © 2011 The Authors. obesity reviews © 2011 International Association for the Study of Obesity. PMID: 21366839 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE] Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21366839
