People around the world drink tea. Hundreds of varieties exist, from white to black and green to oolong. They all naturally have high amounts of health-promoting substances called flavonoids. So they’re thought to bring down inflammation and protect against conditions like heart disease and diabetes.
But can tea help you lose weight?
A cup of this herbal brew or gulping down nine or ten cups of green tea, each day isn’t going to do much for you to get you back into your skinny jeans. If you believe that you can lose your pounds just by drinking tea then you’ve been misled.
But some research suggests tea can help you lose a small amount of weight -- especially when you pair it with a sensible diet and exercise. And consider this: If you swap out your morning mocha latte for a cup of tea with lemon, you'll trim almost 300 calories from your daily total.
Thus, making you get rid of the extra fat deliberately.
Teas have a type of flavonoid called catechins that may boost metabolism and help your body break down fats more quickly. And the caffeine in many teas increases your energy use, causing your body to burn more calories. These two compounds probably work best together for weight loss.
Once you've lost weight, tea could help you keep it off by preventing the metabolism slowdown that's common after dropping a few pounds.
All tea types come from the same leaves--Camellia sinensis. But the leaves are processed in different ways and each tea is a little different.
Black Tea
This is the type of tea that's often served in Chinese restaurants and used to make iced tea. It’s fermented -- a process that allows it to change chemically and often increases its caffeine content. The tea has a strong, rich flavour. Whether it helps with weight loss isn't certain. But research done on rats suggests substances called polyphenols in black tea might help block fat from being absorbed in the intestines.
Watch what you pour into your tea, though. Drinking black tea the English way -- with milk -- might curb its fat-blocking abilities.
Also the milk itself contains fatty acids so as to keep it a low calorie you should always go for the low fat creamer or milk.
Green Tea
Green tea usually isn’t fermented. The leaves are simply steamed and then crushed by hand.
It’s especially high in the most potent type of catechin, called EGCG, which helps stimulate the metabolism of the body. It stimulates the central nervous system which releases the fat into the blood stream and the body uses the fat as fuel which produces extra energy. This sheds the extra water and also helps to burn fat, especially in the stubborn belly region.
Studies show people who took an EGCG-rich green tea extract or drank catechin-enhanced green tea lost a modest amount of weight (about 3 pounds over 3 months.
To get the same amount of EGCG used in the research, you'd need to drink about six to seven cups of your typical green tea every day. You could also try a green tea extract, but it might be risky. Though rare, high-dose tea extracts found in some weight-loss supplements have been linked to serious liver damage.
Swapping cups of high caffeine and sugary teas and drinks with green tea helps keep a check on calorie intake. Drinking a number of cups of green tea also cuts down on your hunger, and since you feel like eating less, weight loss is definitely on the cards.
Oolong Tea
This tea is made by drying tea leaves in the hot sun. Like green tea, it's a rich source of catechins. In one study, more than two-thirds of overweight people who drank oolong tea every day for six weeks lost more than 2 pounds and trimmed belly fat.
Oolong tea influences energy expenditure (EE) which means it helps to increase the rate of fat burning for a certain task as in comparison to the normal energy taken for the same task.
White Tea
This tea is the least processed, and it has a light, sweet flavour. It is as pleasing to the waistline as it is to the palate?
One laboratory study showed white tea sped up the breakdown of existing fat cells and blocked the formation of new ones. Whether it has the same effects in the human body remains to be seen.
But still it can be taken for its parallel benefits such as boosting cardiovascular health, helping to lower cholesterol, reducing the risk of cancer.