Anybody found green tea beneficial - does it vasodilate or vasoconstrict?

[Bansaw]

My Korean friends tell me that Jasmine tea (it has green tea base) is very good for digestion and breaks down fats well.
Has anyone found green tea/jasmine tea helpful in anyway?
There seems to be conflicting reports out there that green tea because it contains caffeine it vasoconstricts, but other reports saying it vasodilates.
I am interested in antioxidants since my methylation cycle might not be working well and maybe low on Glutathione.
Plus green tea = metabolism help, and that might mean a touch more energy.

Any comments?

 

[Effi]

@Bansaw Green tea gives me the jitters. I think it's because it's high in oxalates.

I'd say it's a vasodilator. Also with teas though there's a difference in properties when you drink it cold vs hot, made with boiling water vs lukewarm (sun tea), etc. There's a lot of things to take into account.

 

[Richard7]

I would try it and see.

jasmin comes in black and green tea variants and should not contain any flowers. They store tea in the same room as jasmin flowers that lend their essence to the tea. But some cheap teas do contain the flowers.

You may want to try other teas (white, oolong, pu erh etc.) and as Effi wrote you can make the same tea in many different ways, as hot, warm or cold extractions at varying strengths and for varying lengths of time.

I really cannot stand jasmin, though I loved it when I was a kid and I guess you could call it a gateway drug, as it was the first tea I remember really being interested in at 5 or 6 or whenever it was. These days it gives me a headache.

 

[Crux]

I've been drinking 2-3 cups of green tea lately. Since it isn't brewed for long and doesn't contain as much caffeine as black tea or coffee, it's less stimulating in that way.

Caffeine, apparently, will initially constrict vessels, but, relaxes them in the long run. ( confusing )

Green tea can effect vessels either way, adaptogenic, possibly depending on EGCG content .

Green tea is antimicrobial, so if there is inflammation/infection, it may reduce nitric oxide, ( vasodilator ), production by inhibiting the pathogen growth.

It can also increase eNOS, a nitric oxide producing enzyme, which would dilate and relax vessels.

So, if someone has excess nitric oxide production with vasodilation, green tea could worsen it.

 

[u&iraok]

I sometimes find green tea helpful if it's a time when I can handle the caffeine. I'm not sure what it is in it, but I'm thinking it could be the theanine--it clears my head and gives me a slight boost and calms me down at the same time (kind of like what people say cigarettes did for them).

Matcha seems to work best for me.

Be careful if you have a thyroid problem--they can contain a lot of fluoride and the ones from China can have heavy metals and other toxins in them.

 

[Seven7]

Green tea is a Th2 shifter, I had my immune profile done and would not be good for me (I think diseases like RA that are th2 would not be good either).

Green tea crashes me so I guess you can try and monitor if you feel better or worse. Just don't add anything else new nor increase activity so you can isolate the test.

 

[u&iraok]

Green tea is a Th2 shifter, I had my immune profile done and would not be good for me (I think diseases like RA that are th2 would not be good either).

Green tea crashes me so I guess you can try and monitor if you feel better or worse. Just don't add anything else new nor increase activity so you can isolate the test.

What?! Green tea shifts the immune system to Th2, all by it's little self?

I found an article about it with two references. One reference didn't have anything about green tea:

Kroemer, Guido, Hirsch, François, González-García, Ana and Martínez-A, Carlos. Differential Involvement of Thl and Th2 Cytokines in Autoimmune Diseases. Autoimmunity 24 no.1 (1996): 25-33:

Differential Involvement of Thl and Th2 Cytokines in Autoimmune Diseases

Guido Kroemera, François Hirscha, Ana González-Garcíaa & Carlos Martínez-Ab*
pages 25-33

Abstract
By virtue of their functional antagonism, Thl cells or cells producing the same cytokines as Thl cells may behave as 'suppressor cells' with respect to Th2 cells and vice versa. An excessive Th1- or Th2-like response may favor the development of different autoimmune diseases. As can be expected from their physiological role, Th-1 cytokines participate in autoimmune diseases with a preferential delayed type hyper-sensitivity component, i.e. in those diseases in which cytotoxic T cells attack organ-specific target cells. Autoimmune diseases with a predominant Thl component include experimental autoimmune encephalitis and insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. In contrast, Th2-type responses participate in systemic autoimmune diseases with a strong humoral component. Such diseases probably include certain drug-induced states of autoaggression, namely mercury-induced autoimmune disease and chlorpromazine-induced autoimmunity. It is tempting to speculate that therapeutic interventions designed to recover a normal Thl/Th2 balance will provide a useful etiological strategy for the re-establishment of self-tolerance[./QUOTE]

The other I couldn't access: Prete, Gianfranco Del. The Concept of Type-1 and Type-2 Helper T Cells and Their Cytokines in Humans. International Reviews of Immunology 16 no.3 (1998): 427-455.

Do you have an info on it?

 

[Seven7]

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/rr-green-tea-hazards

Is so widely accepted if you google th2 shifter Herbs you will find the references to books. I will link any study I find ( memory permit!)

 

[Violeta]

Yogi brand decaf green tea tastes really good and is low enough in caffeine that I can drink it at night and it doesn't affect my sleep. The veins on my hands have retracted during this time, but I am also taking a few things for candida, if that would make a difference in vasodilation.

I wonder if green tea is listed as not being good for those with Th2 dominance because the caffeine is hard on the adrenals? If so, decaf may be the answer.

 

[Richard7]

I went off tea and coffee at the begining of last year because the advice I was given was that the caffeine would increase my anxiety. At the time I did not know that I had POTS and that POTS was causing the anxiety.

After a month or so I looked at publmed and all the studies I could find that were done on tea (green, black and oolong) in humans showed that it reduced people's stress hormones or made them better able to handle stressors.

Just glancing at pubmed and skimming a handful of abstracts

it seems that tea works as a vasodilator
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21394199

and that green tea extracts might inhibit fat digestion
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25683932
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15539342

 

[Clerner]

I tried licorice tea once (strong flavor)and something went horribly wrong. I felt spaced-out, slowed down like on drugs, tired, could hardly move, heartbeat felt weird. Anybody know why? I bought it bc I thought it would help my adrenals.

 

[u&iraok]

I tried licorice tea once (strong flavor)and something went horribly wrong. I felt spaced-out, slowed down like on drugs, tired, could hardly move, heartbeat felt weird. Anybody know why? I bought it bc I thought it would help my adrenals.

Licorice can raise blood pressure and/or lower potassium levels. Could it have been one or both of those?

 

[Clerner]

Licorice can raise blood pressure and/or lower potassium levels. Could it have been one or both of those?

Interesting. I bet it was my blood pressure. I felt like I could just drop on the floor. Thanks!

 

[bluelemonade]

Green tea comes from the Camelia Sinensis plant, just like white and black tea. I found out the hard way that tea is not as healthy as everyone says. It can suppress thyroid function. For me, over the course of two years after I started drinking it, I slowly became irritable, depressed, introverted, tired, and my feet got colder and colder. I didn't think it was related to the tea of course. In fact, I drank even more tea because of feeling cold. But the tea plant is grown usually in China and India where the soil contains a lot of aluminum and fluoride. The tea plant is unique in that it absorbs both, and concentrates them in the leaves, which then go into our tea. Organically grown tea has this problem too.

The most dangerous aspect of tea is that it's effect on the thyroid will not show in routine blood tests. Tea lowers TSH, so you end up with what is clinically called "secondary hypothyroidism", and this can only be seen in the more extensive testing not routinely done.

If you decide to drink tea, be sure not to soak the bags more than two minutes, as this will give you the benefits of tea with less of the contaminants.

 

[Mogwai]

It suppressed my thyroid function as well.

 

[Bansaw]

What about red tea (rooibos) ? I drink that a lot.

 

[Wayne]

This is a Cautionary Note on Green Tea:

I've never done paricularly well with green tea. On several occasions after starting to drink it regularly, I would pretty soon stop drinking it. It seems I'd do OK for a few days, but then it would start to tire and wire me out. It's possible I was affected similarly to the guy in the following article who ended up needing a liver transplant after 2-3 months of taking green tea extract. -- Almost always best to follow our instincts.

'The food supplement that ruined my liver'

What is it about green tea supplements that might cause harm at certain doses to some people? Scientists do not know for certain. Because green tea has been drunk for thousands of years, supplements consisting of its concentrated form are regulated in the US and Europe as foods, not medicines. .... the scientific picture of how green tea supplements might affect our health is incomplete.

"If you are drinking modest amounts of green tea you're very safe," says Prof Herbert Bonkovsky, director of liver services at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, who has been tracking injuries linked to green tea supplements for nearly 20 years. "The greater risk comes in people who are taking these more concentrated extracts."

Concern has focused on a potentially toxic ingredient called Epigallocatechin-3-gallate or EGCG, the most abundant of the naturally occurring compounds with antioxidant properties in green tea, called catechins...