Good To Go Green
Here's another reason to drink green tea: researchers say that it can help improve your cholesterol levels.
In a small study in Portugal, scientists found that drinking one liter of green tea a day for a month lowered LDL cholesterol nearly nine percent on average, while it boosted HDL levels an average of four percent. The LDL decline was seen in 90 percent of the participants, while nearly 70 percent experienced HDL increases.
Those are modest improvements, to be sure. But if you're trying to improve your cholesterol profile without drugs, green tea may be a good addition to other approaches like diet, exercise, and targeted supplements like red yeast rice and niacin, when necessary. Green tea has no side effects, and doesn't interact with anything, so it's safe to try. And research has suggested it has other health benefits as well, like preventing certain cancers, promoting weight loss and protecting against Alzheimer's. If you work on putting together a healthy way of life that focuses on a variety of safe measures such as green tea, you will enjoy an overall benefit that far exceeds the effect of any drug or combination of drugs. Living a drug free life is a matter of including a variety of healthy choices, and not dismissing any one of them because the individual benefit appears modest.
