by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: September 08, 2008   Last Updated: September 17, 2010

Used as a powerful herbal medicine in the East for thousands of years, green tea is now moving a little closer to home, and to the cupboards and shelves of people who live in the U.S.A, Britain, and Canada. There are five very good reasons for the increasing popularity of green tea in the West.

Green tea is much more important for us to consume than other teas. Green tea is processed in a different manner than the standard black and Oolong teas, and it is this unique processing method, that allows green tea to retain the majority of its high antioxidant content. Green tea leaves are steamed rather than fermented like other teas are and this allows the polyphenols within it to remain at very high levels. These anti-aging powerhouses known as polyphenols are super antioxidants. Green teas contains up to five times more of them than black teas do. This super antioxidant content within green tea is the reason that Eastern countries have used green tea as a herbal medication in the past and also why they continue to do so today.

So why should you consume green tea? Well there are five very good reasons why you should drink this miracle beverage.

Reason number one:

Green tea has anti-aging properties within it. Green tea is loaded with antioxidants and it is these that combine with the free radicals within the body to make them stable again. Free radicals are those nasty little molecules within our body that for one reason or another are incomplete. They desperately try to become complete by stealing an electron from a separate but complete molecule. Unfortunately when they do this, they then cause the donating molecule to become unstable or to become another free radical, which in turn goes off trying to make itself complete. Free radicals create a chain reaction of damage which eventually results in the death of human cells. As cells die within the body the aging process begins to occur.

Antioxidants are stable molecules no matter whether or not they donate one of their electrons to a free radical. So when a free radical becomes stable by picking up an extra electron from an antioxidant, the chain of damage stops, and the aging process that would have otherwise have occurred slows down. If you are a man then drinking five or more cups of green tea per day can reduce your chance of dying from any cause by twelve percent. If you are a woman and you consume five or more cups of green tea per day then your risk of dying decreases by twenty-three percent.

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