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Groene thee voor meer energie.*
Uit een onderzoek bij muizen blijkt dat groene
thee goed is voor ruim 20% meer energie. Die energie wordt ook nog eens gehaald
uit vet dus de combinatie van groene thee met extra bewegen doet je ook nog
afvallen. De hoeveelheden gebruikt in dit onderzoek zijn te vergelijken voor de
mens met 4 koppen groene thee per dag.
Green Tea Extract Boosts Exercise Endurance 8-24%,
Utilizing Fat As Energy Source
– Now that even
baseball players may need to seek new, more natural performance aids, will
Japanese green tea sets become standard in dugouts and athletic training tables
around the world?
A new study tested
the effect of regularly taking green tea extract (GTE) and found that over 10
weeks, endurance exercise performance was boosted up to 24% with 0.5% GTE
supplementation, and 8% with 0.2% by-weight addition to food.
Reporting in the
online edition of the American Journal of Physiology-Regulatory, Integrative and
Comparative Physiology researchers at the Biological Sciences Laboratories of
Kao Corp., Tochigi, Japan, said the 8-24% increase in swimming
time-to-exhaustion was "accompanied by lower respiratory quotients and
higher rates of fat oxidation."
The results
"indicate that GTE is beneficial for improving endurance capacity and
support the hypothesis that the stimulation of fatty acid utilization is a
promising strategy for improving endurance capacity," according to the
study entitled, "Green tea extract improves endurance capacity and
increases muscle lipid oxidation in mice." Research was conducted by
Takatoshi Murase, Satoshi Haramizu, Akira Shimotoyodome, Azumi Nagasawa and
Ichiro Tokimitsu, working at Kao Corp., a Japanese maker of healthcare products,
including green tea beverages.
Results came from
the equivalent of about 4 cups of tea a day
Although it's
difficult to extrapolate from mice eating GTE as a food supplement to a major
leaguer or Olympic swimmer sipping green tea, the study's lead author, Takatoshi
Murase said: "We estimate that an athlete weighing 75 kilograms (165
pounds) would have to drink about four cups (0.8 liter) of green tea daily to
match the effect in our experiments."
"One of our
important findings," Murase pointed out, "was that a single high-dose
of GTE or its active ingredients didn't affect performance. So it's the
long-term ingestion of GTE that is beneficial." (Murase based his
calculations of mouse-to-human tea/GTE consumption equivalents on work his lab
is doing on the anti-obesity effects of GTE on mice and humans.)
In an era when
professional and amateur athletes are always looking for ways to improve
performance, and most people want to improve their health and exercise
capabilities, "the efficacy of dietary interventions is still
controversial," the authors acknowledge. They note that green tea and cacao
contain a class of polyphenols called catechins, which consist mainly of
epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG), epicatechin gallate and gallocatechin gallate.
Catechins have been reported to have various physiological and pharmacological
properties over the years.
The Kao lab
"recently demonstrated that the long-term consumption of tea catechins was
beneficial in counteracting the obesity-inducing effects of a high-fat diet, and
that their effects may be attributed, at least in part, to the activation of
hepatic lipid catabolism" in mice. "Overall," the authors said,
"observations so far suggest that thermogenesis and fat oxidation are
stimulated by the intake of catechins." (Febr. 2005)