Health Benefits of Green Tea
“A teacupful of medicine? Green tea has held a long-standing place in traditional Asian medicine. Scientific research is now beginning to explain why” – this is the title of the editorial published in the June 2008 issue of the medical journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology. A new study in the journal discusses the effects of the polyphenol most abundant in green tea, (-) –epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG). Erich Wanker and colleagues at the Max Delbrück Institute for Molecular Medicine in Berlin-Buch, Germany have looked at the effect this substance has on the formation of certain fibrils associated with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. According to the editorial cited above, these “new findings suggest that EGCG may prevent toxic fibril formation” (p. 537).
These findings follow on the heels of another story. In the September 2007 issue of Blood: Journal of the American Society of Hematology a scientific letter appeared about the possible effectiveness of green tea in curing amyloidosis, a medical condition in which amyloid proteins are abnormally deposited in organs and tissues of the body. The author Werner Hunstein, a renowned professor emeritus of hematology (University of Heidelberg), who suffers from amyloidosis himself, traces the effects of green tea in improving his own illness. Hunstein was diagnosed with amyloidosis in 2001, and the aggressive chemotherapy treatment that followed left him shattered. That he managed to recover his strength and go back to normal in his daily life, Hunstein attributes to green tea. When he began to drink large amounts of green tea (usually about two quarts per day), his condition improved significantly; the deposition of amyloid proteins was stopped, and his heart resumed beating more strongly.
Needless to say, he also believed in drinking clean tea. The tea Professor Hunstein drank was the Green Darjeeling from Teekampagne / Tea Campaign.
