Can Black Tea Help With Weight Loss?
Many people who are looking to lose weight and get rid of tummy fat often resort to taking teas. There’s green, black, oolong and many other tea types in the market. One of the more common weight loss aids is green tea. Most weight loss enthusiasts understand that it contains little or no calories and helps rev their metabolism, resulting in gradual weight loss.
Black tea however, isn’t as popular because there hasn’t been any study to show that it helps people lose weight. So, when people drink black tea, they often do so for the taste, flavor and color.
Black Tea Studies Weight Loss
However, a recent study conducted by a group of researchers at UCLA and published in the European Journal of Nutrition has shown that black tea could actually help you lose weight, improve your overall health and provide many other benefits, simply by altering your gut’s microflora –the same mechanism green tea uses to promote and aid weight loss.
The study which was carried out on mice showed that black tea was able to improve energy metabolism in mice, through the alteration of intestinal metabolites. How is this possible?
Well, researchers found that black tea has the capacity to change the quantity of certain gut bacteria in the mice. As a result, the population of good bacteria that helps with building a lean body increased, while that associated with obesity and overweight tendencies were drastically reduced –yes, certain gut bacteria help increase the odds of you becoming obese.
So, with an increase in population of the good, metabolism boosting bacteria, the mice experienced increased weight loss.
Green and black tea contain key antioxidants known as polyphenols, which contribute to altering the liver’s metabolic capabilities. The only difference between both groups of polyphenols is in how they both function. Green tea’s polyphenols are easily absorbed by the intestine and sent directly to the liver to boost metabolism and aid weight loss.
Black tea polyphenols according to this latest research, aids weight loss by simply encouraging the growth of certain gut bacteria and helps with the creation of short chain fatty acids –a compound that can affect the liver’s rate of metabolism. So, unlike the green tea polyphenols that can be absorbed, black tea polyphenols cannot, but they can trigger and help processes, resulting in the same goal.
According to Susanne Henning, adjunct professor at the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition and the lead author of the study, “It was known that green tea polyphenols are more effective and offer more health benefits than black tea polyphenols since green tea chemicals are absorbed into the blood and tissue. Our new findings suggest that black tea, through a specific mechanism through the gut microbiome, may also contribute to good health and weight loss in humans. The results suggest that both green and black teas are prebiotics, substances that induce the growth of good microorganisms that contribute to a person’s well-being,”
The study concluded that mice that were given black tea experienced weight loss comparable to those that were placed only on low fat, high sugar diet. This is in spite of the high fat, high sugar diets they were placed on. this means that if these mice were placed on low fat, low sugar or high sugar diets, they would have lost far more weight than they did during the study.
According to Dr. Zhaoping Li, director of the UCLA Center for Human Nutrition, chief of the UCLA Division of Clinical Nutrition and the study’s senior author, “the findings suggest that the health benefits of both green tea and black tea go beyond their antioxidant benefits, and that both teas have a strong impact on the gut microbiome. For black tea lovers, there may be a new reason to keep drinking it”.
Final Thoughts On Black Tea Weight Loss
Bottom line, some people like black tea, others prefer green. If black tea is your favorite beverage of choice, you should not stop taking, particularly if you have weight loss goal. So, enjoy more of your black brew and have fun drinking it, knowing that you are helping your body lose weight, and are staying healthier because of it.
