Top 5 Benefits of Green Tea

It’s amazing how much green tea has shot to fame in recent years. Once just known in Asian countries to promote health it’s now sold in pretty much every supermarket and café in the UK and recommended by celebrities for its health-boosting properties. OK, so we all know that green tea is healthy but what is it exactly that makes it so good for you? Check out the Top 5 Benefits of Green Tea; reasons why you should swap your daily coffee for a mug of the green stuff!

1. Helps to prevent and fight cancer

The antioxidants in green tea help to fight all sorts of diseases that could occur in your body including potentially cancerous cells. The polyphenols in green tea are one of the wonderful little fighters that help protect us against cancer if we drink enough of the tea.

Don’t get me wrong though, green tea isn’t going to cure cancer or guarantee that you don’t get it, but there’s no harm in drinking it to support your body’s immune system to give yourself a better chance of not getting illnesses. There’s no solid evidence as to how much you need to drink but I advise drinking at least two cups a day, four if you can!

2. Speeds up your metabolism

Drinking at least a couple of cups a day is known to help speed up your metabolism. This means that alongside a healthy diet and exercise, green tea could help you to get lean and burn calories!

You can’t just eat junk food and drink green tea expecting it to work its magic. You need to eat other foods that help to speed up your metabolism, like good fats, and keep as active as possible (HIIT training is best) and you’ll soon see and feel a difference.

3. Promotes good dental health

Green tea helps to prevent cavities, bad breath and provide general oral health by killing bad bacteria. Again, don’t expect to use it as a way to justify eating cavity-causing sugar, but coupled with a healthy diet it will help to keep your mouth fresh and clean. (Hopefully you won’t get any bad news at your next dental appointment!)

4. Helps fight the signs of ageing

Those awesome polyphenols that I mentioned earlier also help to fight the signs of ageing by attacking the free radicals in the body. Free radicals are potentially harmful cells that develop over time but green tea helps to fight these and as a result helps to give you a youthful glow and more energy.

5. Can improve brain function

You may not know this but just like black tea, green tea also contains caffeine. It doesn’t contain as much as coffee of course but it has enough to help keep you focused and act as a stimulant in a similar way to coffee. Need to pull out an all-nighter? Green tea will help keep you ticking over without giving you that after-coffee crash!

There are many other benefits of green tea but they are still being researched. Hopefully soon there will be more concrete evidence to support them. But there’s no doubt that green tea can be classed as a superfood because although it’s nothing special to look at, it has a huge range of health boosting properties that support all aspects of your body and life.

It can taste a bit peculiar at first but keep drinking it and before you know it you won’t notice the taste, plus you can also buy different flavours in health food shops anyway. How about pear and honey?  Do let us know what awesome flavours you come across and try!

Safia Yallaoui

Safia is a lifestyle blogger and coach at the fitness membership company MoveGB. She also has an MA in journalism and has done a variety of freelance work in print, radio and online. After losing 14lbs a few years ago Safia got into health and fitness realising the most important thing about clean eating is nourishing your body. She loves to keep in shape with weight training and going to fitness classes. Whilst training to be a Nutritional Therapist she is learning how to alleviate health problems by including or omitting certain foods and has a keen interest in the affects of sugar on a person's physical and mental health.

We will be happy to hear your thoughts

Leave a reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Keep Fit Kingdom
Logo