Green tea with every meal helps weight loss

It may be time to ignore the faint but nagging fishy scent and embrace the tang of acid: green tea could help limit your weight gain from starchy foods, according to a pilot study.Young adults who had eaten a wafer laced with green tea extract were found to digest significantly less starch from a bowl of cornflakes than those who had been given a placebo.

Scientists suggested that drinking several cups with a meal could cut the calories absorbed from foods such as bread and potatoes, building on a large but inconclusive body of evidence for green tea's effects on conditions from excess weight to Alzheimer's disease.

Medical researchers in Poland conducted a trial with 28 volunteers aged from 19 to 26. The participants fasted for 12 hours before eating 50g of cornflakes with low-fat milk. Half were given wafers containing green tea extract at the same time, while the other half ate wafers without tea.

The scientists tested the volunteers' breath every half hour for four hours to measure how much starch was being broken down in their stomachs, based on the amount of carbon dioxide they exhaled. After two hours, those who had taken the green tea appeared to have absorbed half as much starch as those on the placebo. After four hours, the difference was still 29 per cent.

This appeared to offer tentative support for studies that have shown green tea to combat obesity in several ways, the scientists said, although the sample was small and the dose of tea extract was larger than most people would take in the real world.

"Epidemiological evidence and several randomised controlled intervention trials have shown that habitual tea consumption, especially green tea, has a positive effect on health," they wrote in the journal Scientific Reports. "Green tea is known to exert antiobesity activity like reduction of adipocyte [fat cell] differentiation and proliferation, lipogenesis [formation of fatty acids], fat mass, body weight and fat absorption."

They suggested that green tea might be a cheap and effective substitute for weight-loss or diabetes-fighting drugs that target the blood sugar system.

Green tea is made from the same shrub as black tea, Camellia sinensis, but the leaves are much less oxidised in preparation. They contain higher levels of chemicals that are claimed to have a range of beneficial properties and have long been used in Chinese traditional medicine. It is also rich in a group of compounds called polyphenols that are said to reduce blood sugar and hence the risk of developing diabetes.

The jury is still out on most of the health benefits cited for green tea. A wide-ranging analysis in 2012 found no link between drinking green tea and weight loss. Other reviews have found that there is no reason to believe it affords protection against cancer, although some varieties may slightly reduce cholesterol and the odds of developing dementia.

? A spoonful of sugar doesn't just mask the bitterness of coffee or tea, it triggers a chemical reaction that changes the taste. Scientists have discovered that an affinity between water and sugar molecules causes caffeine molecules -- responsible for the bitter taste of tea and coffee -- to bond together so that their taste is less obvious.