Green Tea Extracts

You probably shouldn't take them. For several reasons.

1) The tea used in green tea extracts is of the lowest quality. Yes, you'll get considerable amounts of antioxidants, and yes, the taste doesn't matter when you're swallowing a pill. But the lowest quality tea also has the highest level of toxins, such as fluoride, aluminum, and whatever else the soil has been exposed to.

2) Taking a pill every morning isn't as effective as drinking several cups of tea over the course of the day. Most of the antioxidants in tea get flushed out of your system, so drinking 6 cups of tea over the course of 12 hours will keep more antioxidants in your system for a longer time than taking one pill with the equivalent of 6 cups of tea once a day.

3) Too much of a good thing is bad. Your kidneys and liver filter the polyphenols in tea out of your bloodstream. I could explain why your body does this, but that would take research I don't feel like doing right now, so I'll post on it later. Anyway, there's an upper limit to how much of these antioxidants are good for you. Some green tea extracts are equivalent to ten, twenty, forty, fifty, or more cups of tea, and that is not good.

Check it out.

It's partly our culture that decrees if something is good, then more of it must be better. I haven't found any studies that have shown liver or kidney damage can be caused by drinking tea alone, so it may just be that the supplements do this by introducing too many polyphenols into the body at one time, but then I doubt there is anyone who's ever drank 50 cups of green tea a day on a regular basis.

I've found several websites that sell these supplements, and they tend to say things along the line of, "there's no such thing as 'too much' when it comes to green tea." If you see one of these ridiculous bullshit claims, just remember that they are trying to sell you a product, not make you live longer.

Ditch the supplements and just drink tea. Or if you're savvy with herbal rememedies and like the convenience of supplements, make your own extracts! Just boil the tea in a pot like you normally would, remove the tea leaves and let the tea sit on low heat for several hours, and wait for all the water to evaporate off. The powdery residue on the bottom of the pot is your extract. Just remember how much tea you put into the pot in the first place so you don't accidentally megadose on green tea extract and make yourself sick.