The press has recently been full of claims regarding the healthy properties of green tea - is it really as good as they say?
While green tea has been used as a medicine in China for over 4,000 years, it is only in the past couple of years that it has started to gain real attention in the West.
It is now being touted as a wonder cure for everything from cancer to fat loss, but is it really that good? Surprisingly, there's actually a growing body of hard evidence to support some of these claims.
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute has published a study suggesting that drinking green tea reduced the risk of esophageal cancer in Chinese men and women by nearly sixty percent, while University of Purdue researchers concluded that a compound in green tea inhibits the growth of cancer cells.
These are dramatic claims for a humble herbal beverage - so what is it in green tea that gives it these amazing properties?
