Will Green Tea Start Showing Up in Sports Drinks?

In a very small study out of Brazil, researchers from the “Federal University of Santa Catarina, and the Center of Physical Education, Physiotherapy and Sports of Santa Catarina State University” tested how the prior consumption of green tea vs. water affected athletes before and after doing resistance exercises. These exercises create a lot of oxidative stress in the body.

The athletes, aged between nineteen and thirty, drank water or green tea three times a day for seven days. Then they performed sets of a bench press exercise. Apparently, researchers
collected blood before and after the exercise sets. What the researchers tested for was the levels of glutathione, lipid hydroperoxide and the ferric reducing ability of plasma (FRAP) assay which helps them determine the total antioxidant capacity.

The benefits of drinking green tea that accrue before exercise is a FRAP level 21% higher than the water group. This could offer better protection against the oxidative stress done by exercise.

In addition, the finding after exercising were that the amount of glutathione was 37% higher in
those that had been drinking the green tea. Glutathione is a protein that helps protect us from the damage done by free radicals. Now I’m just musing here, but since free radical damage becomes worse as you grow older (part of what ages us as I understand it), then this seems to indicate that we would derive greater benefit from drinking green tea as we get older.

But back to the athletes. The amount of lipid hydroperoxides, which are apparently not only a by-product of vegetable oil processing, was reduced by 64%. That’s a pretty good reduction. And polyphenols were 27% higher before and after exercise.

One can easily guess that although more research will be needed, we will begin seeing green tea showing up in sports drinks in the future.

Source: http://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/news/ng.asp?n=84652-green-tea-sports-nutrition