Green Tea Dosage - What Gives the Most Benefits?
By Kathryn Lane
Anybody wondering about green tea dosage must be already sold on the benefits of green tea.
I always feel the word "dosage" sounds odd when you're talking about a natural food product. After all, this isn't a prescription drug. It's a good, healthful drink that's been consumed by humans for centuries -- in fact, apparently for thousands of years. Nobody ever says, "What's my proper dosage of coffee?"
Come to think of it, that's the point, isn't it? Coffee just doesn't have the same health history. It's a reasonable question to ask. So just what amount of green tea has shown benefits, in either clinical trials or population studies?
The general answer is: about three cups. That's the average amount that people drink in Japan and China, the countries where population studies indicate that green tea reduces cancer rates, to take just one example. So that's a reasonable amount to suggest. If you want a good green tea dosage, drink about three cups a day.
In the interest of accuracy and completeness, I should mention that some researchers have suggested that you need to drink up to 10 cups a day for maximum health benefits. Not too many of us are willing to drink that much. I won't drink that much, even though I'm a fan!
(A cupful, if you want to be exact, is about eight ounces or 250 ml. So you might want to measure the amount of tea your favorite drinking cup actually holds, to get an accurate idea of how much you're drinking.)
Another way in which tea is different from prescription drugs is that the amount of the important antioxidant ingredients called polyphenols will vary somewhat, depending on natural differences in tea grown in different places and different times. How you brew the tea makes a difference, too.
Here is one good recipe for brewing this traditional beverage.
Put one teaspoon (that's 5 grams) of green tea leaves in a cup and add 8 ounces (250 ml) of water that isn't quite at boiling temperature. (Boiling is a little too hot for the delicate, unfermented green tea leaves, the tea experts say.) If you are using tea bags, of course you can check the amount in the bag and use one or two, depending on how you like it. Steep the tea for about three minutes. Let it cool for three or four minutes before you drink it. You can add either milk or lemon and a sweetener if you like, but keep in mind that adding sugar to your diet isn't a plus for anyone. If some sweetness is important to you but you want to avoid adding sugar, you might try stevia, a natural sweetener with no calories.
(Why the advice to let the tea cool a bit before drinking? Because it's important not to drink it scalding hot. Studies have shown that drinking any extremely hot drink can increase your chances of getting esophageal cancer. So no matter whether you're drinking hot tea, coffee or cocoa, let it cool just a bit before drinking it.)
For me, the ideal way to get the best green tea dosage, without the caffeine or even the bother of brewing, is a high quality extract that's one ingredient in a quality supplement. The supplement I take every day gives me all these benefits.
Check my website for supplements containing an excellent
green tea dosage
Kathryn Lane is a health and nutrition researcher. She says the most valuable and effective products she finds are rarely the most expensive or the most advertised. Check out her website: http://www.abc-balanced-supplements.info/
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