It’s an interesting question, you know. I am pretty sure everybody’s thinking that it is the green tea that helps you lose weight. Well, I’ll be honest with you and will just say that both green and oolong teas can help you battle against excess weight.

Oolong tea active compound

The unique thing about the Oolong tea is that it contains a large quantity of polyphenol. And according to some recent researches it’s the polyphenol compound of oolong tea that generates its delicious flavor and promotes its weight loss, beauty and overall health properties.

Black and Green tea active compounds

If you remember green tea’s main compound is catechin. Black tea on the other hand contains ingredient called theaflavin, and as I already mentioned above oolong tea contains polyphenol. Some of you may be surprised to know that all these black, green, and oolong tea are made from the same leaf. That’s right, all these different kinds and flavors of teas are made from the leaf of the same tea plant that originates from China and belongs to the camellia family.

Tea production methods

If you wonder how’s that possible, I’ll tell you - it’s all about the production methods and particularly the fermentation process of leaves. Oolong tea is semi- fermented (leaves are left to ferment to a certain state), green tea is unfermented and black tea is full fermented (the leaves are left to ferment fully).

Benefits of Oolong tea

Most of the researches concerning oolong tea are concentrated around the idea of how powerful its anti-oxidant properties really are. In fact, the official oolong tea website points out various studies that confirm a possible connection between drinking oolong tea and better fat metabolism and body detoxification.

Detoxification is the first and most important step to successful weight loss. And guess what, that’s exactly that oolong tea is going to do for you – detoxify your body. It does that in two ways:

1) Enhances the function of the enzymes responsible for free radicals elimination and
2) Removes the free radicals by itself

And as we all know free radicals are bad for health and beauty. They oxidize the regular lipids within the body to convert them into lipid peroxide, which is also not good and should be fight against.

Luckily oolong tea, just like green tea, can really help you lower lipid peroxides, because that’s what oolong tea is really good at – catches the free radicals, which are result of fat lipid oxidation, and eliminates them.

In conclusion

One thing is for certain – oolong tea is a healthy drink and is very similar to green tea, but after all they are both derived from the same plant and it’s normal to have similar benefits (benefits of green tea). And yes, oolong tea may aid you in weight loss, but not in a miraculous way, as many of you might expect.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 14th, 2007 at 3:38 pm and is filed under Antioxidants, Oolong Tea. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.