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XIANJU ORGANIC GREEN TEA
The prophylactic benefit of a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and their derivatives is hardly news these days. It’s already believed that downing hefty amounts of tomatoes helps to protect against colon cancer; that red wine is beneficial to the heart; and that nutrients found in blueberries, raspberries, garlic, onions and a whole list of other edibles have similar disease-preventive effects.
A good amount of research has also credited an extract of green tea with anti-cancer activity because it performs as a scavenger of oxidated free radicals whose demise is also beneficial to victims of neuro-degenerative diseases. So one of Moussa Youdim’s colleagues at the Technion, Argentinean-born Dr. Sylvia Mandel, is also looking into green tea specifically as a neuro-protective agent a means, that is, of trying to minimize vulnerability to Parkinson’s disease. What initially caught her attention about Polyphenols the anti-oxidant component in many fruits and vegetables is that they also trap iron, which, as it happens, is a very important element in the pathogenesis of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. I began my work by looking deeper into the literature on cancer, Mandel relates, because cancer - if you greatly simplify it is the opposite of Parkinson’s disease. And to treat cancer, you want to kill cells, whereas in Parkinson’s you want to preserve them. We know that high doses of vitamins C or E, for example kill cells, but low concentrations have an opposite, protective, effect,” she continues. So I started to wonder whether these same processes would apply to the polyphenols in green tea.
To find out Mandel threw a metaphorical tea party for her lab mice. She gave some of them an extract of green tea and others EGCG, a clean molecule that comprises over 30 percent of the tea’s polyphenolic structure. Then she used the standard method of chemically inducing Parkinsonian damage in the mice, and lo and behold: Both the extract and the isolated ECGC had given the animals full protection, Mandel reports. We don’t have any preliminary results in humans, as this work is still on the level of basic science,” she adds prudently. But we now know that these substances prevent animals from ‘going over the cliff.’
Better yet, there are signs that EGCG may also have neuro-rescue qualities. In mice suffering from the initial stages of Parkinson’s disease, we saw that we could halt the further deterioration of neurons, Mandel explains. But in cell cultures, we actually rescued already damaged neurons, enabling them to back up the slope, so to speak. And in the next stage, we hope to be able to do this in animals.
Since word of her research has spread, people have been asking Mandel how many cup of green tea they should imbibe for neuro-protection. Actually, I don’t know, she admits. I myself drink three cups a day. And at this stage of our work, I can’t promise that it helps, she hedges. But it certainly doesn’t do any harm.Source: The Jerusalem Report - July 28, 2003
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