What Are the Benefits of Green Tea?

Drinking green tea is claimed to provide a wide variety of health benefits. However, many of these claims are clearly overstated, and it is not known whether taking green tea supplements provides the same benefits as drinking green tea.

 

It seems like green tea is claimed to be useful for just about everything. People use green tea for various reasons, such as for the following uses:

 

Many claimed health benefits of green tea are based on studies known as "population studies." These studies compare the natural habits of large groups of people, often based on lifestyle or dietary factors. For instance, studies have shown that Japanese men who drink more green tea have lower cholesterol, compared to Japanese men who drink less green tea. While this may suggest that green tea may help lower cholesterol, it is important to understand that the results of such studies can be due to numerous other factors. For instance, perhaps the men who drank more green tea ate more healthy diets, and perhaps the green tea itself had no effect on cholesterol. While population studies are good for gaining clues about risk factors, they rarely clearly establish "cause and effect" relationships.