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Animal study: half cup of green tea daily is life extending
If you react in the same way to EGCG, the most important bioactive substance in green tea, as the mice that American sports scientist Brandt Pence used in his experiments, then you'll live longer if you drink half a cup of green tea every day. And you can drink more if you like. The life extending effect of EGCG and green tea increases the more you consume.
Study
Pence, who works at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will soon publish the results of a study in which he divided elderly male mice into three groups.
For a period of nine weeks one group was given standard feed [Ctrl], a second group got feed with a small amount of EGCG [Lo-EGCG] and a third group got feed with 40 times as much EGCG [Hi-EGCG].
The human equivalent of the low dose of EGCG would be 80-90 mg daily. That amount of EGCG is present in half a cup of green tea.
The high dose of EGCG is... well work it out for yourself. It's extremely high. Not everyone will react well to such a high amount.
Results
Pence expected that the supplementation would have positive effects on the mice's brains and muscles. But in tests designed to assess the ability to learn new things, EGCG had no effect at all. Nor did EGCG have any statistically significant effect in tests that Pence used to determine the amount of strength the mice could develop with their claws or the length of time they were able to run in a treadmill.
In the control group, 55 percent of the mice were still alive after two months. In the Lo-EGCG group and the Hi-EGCG group the figures were 72 and 91 percent respectively. And those effects were definitely statistically significant.
Conclusion
"Dietary treatment with EGCG for 9 weeks resulted in a dose-dependent reduction in mortality in aged Balb/cByJ mice," the researchers concluded. "Because this was not considered a priori to be a primary outcome of interest, the mechanisms responsible for this finding were not explored."
"However, several large prospective studies examining green tea consumption in humans have demonstrated lower mortality."
Sponsor
Abbott Nutrition sponsored the study.
Source:
Appl Physiol Nutr Metab. 2017 Jan 5:1-8.
More:
Grow old healthily with green tea 11.02.2012
Drink green tea instead of water - and live longer 24.05.2010
Drink three cups of tea a day and add five years to your life 11.09.2008
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