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1 Sip Your Fat Away *EGCG (Green Tea Extract) We humans drink more tea than any other liquid, except for plain old H2O. And Bill Gottlieb does his part to keep tea number two. Every morning before work, he makes himself a big pot of green tea (we'll talk in a minute about the differences among the three main types of teablack, green, and oolong), and whether the variety he chooses is gunpowder, dragon well or sencha, his daily ritual is always the same. He fills a kettle with water and puts it on the stove to boil...spoons tea leaves into a mesh tea ball ...places the tea ball in a ceramic teapot...fills the pot when the water boils ...puts the pot on a tray...and carries the tray to his office, where he blissfully sips away while reading the morning paper. And here are a few more tea-dious details about Gottlieb: he's fiftythree, five foot ten, and weighs 154 poundsthe same weight as when he graduated from high school. Does drinking green tea every day for so many years have something to do with the fact that he's not suffering from middleaged spread? A bunch of scientists in Taiwan might think so. TEA DRINKERS ARE 20 PERCENT TRIMMER This was the startling news published in the September 2003 issue ofObesity Researchby Dr. ChihHsing Wu and a team of Taiwanese scientists at the National Cheng Kung University Hospital. They had studied more than one thousand men and women, with an average age of fortyeight, querying them about numerous "lifestyle characteristics." Did they smoke? Drink alcohol? Coffee? What were their favorite foods and how often did they eat them? How much did they exercise? How much money did they make? And...how much tea did they drink a day, and for how many years had they been doing so? But the researchers didn't only investigate habits. They also looked into hips. Specifically, they measured each person's percentage of body fat, and their waisttohip ratio, or WTHR. (WTHR is your waist measurement in inches, divided by your hip measurement. It not only shows the size of your belly, but also indicates how healthy you are: people who have a higher WTHR, storing more fat in their tummies, are at a greater risk for heart disease than people who store more fat in their hips and thighs.) The results from the Taiwanese study were remarkable. Of those studied, 43 percent had been "habitual" tea drinkers for ten years or more, drinking about 15 ounces of tea a day. The habitual tea drinkers had, on average, 19.6 percent less body fat than people who didn't drink tea regularly. They also had slimmer waists, with a 2.1 percent lower WTHR. No other lifestyle factorwhether or not they were smokers, snackers, sedentary or highsalariedcorrelated with a lower percentage of body fat. Tea was the likely ticket to leanness. And only a few of those trimmer tea drinkers were regularly drinking Earl Grey, English Breakfast, or another variety of black tea.Eighteenof the habitual tea drinkers drank black tea.Four hundred fiftyfivedrank green or oolong. What's so special about those two varieties? To find out, let's take a quick trip to a tea plantation. GREEN TEA: LEAVING THE GOODNESS IN THE LEAVES Black, green, and oolong tea all start the same way: as leaves onCamellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub that can grow to the height of a tree but is cultivated as a bush on tea plantations. A few times a year, the buds and the tender, young leaves at the top of the bush are picked and then dried on racks. But those dried tea leaves aren't ready for the teapot.Preuss, Harry is the author of 'Natural Fat-loss Pharmacy Drug-free Remedies to Help You Salfely Lose Weight, Shed Fat, Frim Up, and Feel Great', published 2007 under ISBN 9780767924078 and ISBN 076792407X.
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