NPN	Product Code	Size	Per Capsule	Vegetarian
80005898	AOR04067	90 Vegi-Caps	700 mg	100% Vegetarian

Supplement Facts
Serving Size: 1 Capsule		Amount Per Capsule
Green Tea (Camellia sinesis) Extract		700mg
Total catechins		455mg
Epigallocatechin gallate (EGCG)		315mg
Epicatechin gallate (ECg)		75mg
Epigallocatechin (EGC)		30mg
Epichtechin (EC)33mg		35mg
Caffeine		7mg
Non-medicinal ingredients: ascorbyl palmitate. Capsule: hypromellose, water.

AOR guarantees that no ingredients not listed on the label have been added to AOR Active Green Tea. AOR Active Green Tea contains no wheat, gluten, corn, nuts, dairy, soy, eggs, fish, shellfish or any animal byproduct.

AOR Active Green Tea Suggested Use
To equate to the EGCG consumption of the best Japanese studies, take three capsules daily with food, or as directed by a qualified health care practitioner.  Do not use AOR Active Green Tea if pregnant or nursing.  For use beyond 3 months, consult a health care practitioner.

Main Applications of AOR Active Green Tea
As reported by literature:
• Supports normal cell growth and differentiation.
• Antioxidant

Source
Leaves of Camellia sinensis.

AOR Active Green Tea During Pregnancy/Nursing
Safe at 1 capsule daily.

Cautions
Consult a health care practitioner prior to use if you have a liver disorder or develop symptoms of liver trouble.

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While herbal "teas" can be brewed from the leaves, flowers, or even roots of almost anything that grows out of the Earth, true tea - both green and black - comes from the leaves of Camellia sinensis. The difference in taste and in health benefits comes from the way the tea leaves are processed: to make black tea, the leaves are fermented, which oxidizes many of the antioxidants present in the leaves, while green tea is produced by lightly steaming the fresh-cut leaf.

Green Tea was brought to Japan by Buddhist monks from China, and the Japanese people quickly embraced the soothing, grassy brew. Today, the citizens of Japan boast the longest average lifespan in the world, and there are reams of research to suggest that green tea is a major factor in their robust health.

Research in experimental animals has found green tea or its extracts to be effective against chemically-induced cancers of the lung, breast, colon, liver, and skin, as well as a variety of gastrointestinal organs, cancers induced by chemical carcinogens; more excitingly, Green Tea extracts have been found to protect animals from existing, spontaneous prostate cancer. More important to us is the human evidence for the health benefits of Green Tea consumption. Extensive epidemiological evidence shows that people consuming high amounts of Japanese sencha green tea live longer develop less Cancer, have healthier Cholesterol levels, suffer less cardiovascular and liver disease, and may be less susceptible to heart attacks.

The evidence for the cancer-fighting powers of green tea is so strong that human clinical trials of green tea powders and extracts are now under way at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and at other clinical centers in the United States.

How Much Tea?
But other studies have found no difference in cancer incidence among higher and lower drinkers of Green Tea. In the most infamous example, a study published in 2001 in the New England Journal of Medicine found no protective effect of green tea consumption against gastric Cancer, despite the fact that numerous previous studies had found that drinking green tea does provide a shield against this killer. As with so many other things, the key appears to lie in the amount of green tea being consumed. In the New England Journal of Medicine study, drinking five or more cups of green tea a day put people into the highest consumption group. By contrast, the most consistent epidemiological evidence for a protective effect of green tea comes from the consumption of ten cups or more of Japanese sencha per day.

How Do You Get that in Pills?
Few Westerners drink this much Green Tea. So to get green tea's benefits, many health-conscious people have turned to standardized extracts of the green tea leaf itself. That seems to be an especially attractive option when many companies advertise small green tea pills which allegedly contain the equivalent of five to ten cups of Green Tea apiece. Unfortunately, nearly all green tea extract capsules contain only a fraction of the green tea "cup-equivalents" than their manufacturers claim.

These companies aren't flat-out lying, but they're using the wrong yardstick - or, to be more precise, the wrong cup. The problem is that the amount of EGCG (the main Cancer-fighting component) and other goodies in a cup of green tea can vary over a wide range, depending on the kind of green tea, the region where it's grown, the brewing time, tea leaf, kind of teabag - and, of course, the size of the cup! By choosing to compare a supplement to the poorest-quality green tea infusions, supplement companies use "creative accounting" to evaluate the potency of their pills. They can inflate the comparison, asserting that their products' 100 to 200 milligrams of EGCG is equivalent to five to ten cups of Green Tea.

But this is just misleading. When all of these factors are taken into account, and when you consider that the most consistent research on green tea's health-enhancing effects in humans comes from drinkers of Japanese sencha, the "gold standard" cup of green tea can contains 150 milligrams of EGCG. This means, unfortunately, that few green tea capsules even deliver the equivalent of even one full cup of Japanese green tea a day - let alone the ten cups that is most consistently associated with good health and long life.

If you're looking to use Green Tea for longevity and to guard against age-related disease, it only makes sense to get the best-backed dose of the best-backed molecule. Indeed, it's these kinds of doses - 800 to 1600 milligrams of EGCG per day that are being used in the human clinical trials that have begun in the last few years.

The Caffeine Conundrum
Green tea contains very little caffeine compared to coffee - but of course, it can still add up if you start drinking ten cups of the steaming brew a day. Indeed, one clinical trial which has been using ground tea solids as its ‘drug' has reported significant side-effects - including insomnia, fatigue, confusion, nausea, diarrhea, stomach pain, and even vomiting - linked to the caffeine content.

Some green tea supplements are fully decaffeinated to avoid any such problems. While this approach is better than adding as much as 500 milligrams of extra caffeine to your day, these supplements are inherently less effective than real tea, because several studies have found that caffeine itself plays a significant role in the Cancer-fighting powers of Green Tea.

There are other benefits to moderate intake of caffeine, despite the clear negative impacts of being a full-fledged caffeine junkie. For instance, a large body of research now suggests that modest caffeine consumption reduces your risk of developing Parkinson's disease - probably as a result of caffeine's ability to modulate adenosine A2A receptors in the brain. Another example: Green Tea polyphenols and caffeine synergize to increase the body's thermogenic fat-burning activity - effects with important implications for the Battle of the Bulge, which is an engagement important for health and vanity alike.

Thus, rigorously eliminating the caffeine content from Green Tea - whether you get it in cup or capsule - is not the best strategy for your long-term health. While a zero-tolerance approach may be the only way for a few extremely caffeine-sensitive individuals to get the benefits of EGCG, most people will be better off getting at least a little caffeine in with their green tea. Lightly-caffeinated green tea extracts provide a happy medium between caffeine-induced side effects and the loss of significant health benefits.

Putting it All in a Capsule
So getting the full benefits of Green Tea - an icon of Zen simplicity - turns out to involve taking a lot of factors into consideration. Green tea extracts should be HPLC standardized to their content of EGCG. They should make it convenient to get 1500 milligrams of EGCG a day, to match the strong epidemiological evidence of health benefits in Japanese sencha drinkers. And they should contain at least a little caffeine, so that the often-synergistic interactions between EgCG and caffeine can be unleashed. Put it all together, and you'll have squeezed a remarkable amount of health benefit into a few small capsules.

References

Fujiki H, Suganuma M, Imai K, Nakachi K. Green tea: cancer preventive beverage and/or drug. Cancer Lett. 2002 Dec 15; 188(1-2): 9-13.

Mukhtar H, Ahmad N. Tea polyphenols: prevention of cancer and optimizing health. Am J Clin Nutr. 2000 Jun; 71(6 Suppl): 1698S-702S.

Nakachi K, Matsuyama S, Miyake S, Suganuma M, Imai K. Preventive effects of drinking green tea on cancer and cardiovascular disease: epidemiological evidence for multiple targeting prevention. Biofactors. 2000; 13(1-4): 49-54.

Tokunaga S, White IR, Frost C, Tanaka K, Kono S, Tokudome S, Akamatsu T, Moriyama T, Zakouji H. Green tea consumption and serum lipids and lipoproteins in a population of healthy workers in Japan. Ann Epidemiol. 2002 Apr; 12(3): 157-65.

Shibata K, Moriyama M, Fukushima T, Kaetsu A, Miyazaki M, Une H. Green tea consumption and chronic atrophic gastritis: a cross-sectional study in a green tea production village. J Epidemiol. 2000 Sep; 10(5): 310-6.

Inoue M, Tajima K, Hirose K, Hamajima N, Takezaki T, Kuroishi T, Tominaga S. Tea and coffee consumption and the risk of digestive tract cancers: data from a comparative case-referent study in Japan. Cancer Causes Control. 1998 Mar; 9(2): 209-16.

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