The Ultimate Tea Diet- Hype or Miracle Weight Loss?

As a daily drinker of tea, I am a big proponent of it’s health benefits, which include a high amount of anti-oxidants. I was excited to come across the book, The Ultimate Tea Diet, the other day at the bookstore!

Although I do love tea, I was pretty skeptical of what looked like another gimmicky-type diet with no scientific backing.

However, I think the author, Mark “Dr. Tea” Ukra, may be onto something.

He recommends drinking as much green, black, oolong, or white tea as you’d like. He claims that tea will “help us lose weight, reduce our cravings for sweets, suppress our appetite, increase our insulin’s effectiveness, lower our cholesterol, and stimulate thermogenesis, which helps the body burn fat for energy.” Sounds great! But the scientific studies showing this are lacking.

So is it bunk?

While the use of caffeine is a universal claim to help in weight loss, it’s actually another ingredient that the book discusses which was enlightening to me. L-theanine, actually counteracts the harmful effects of the caffeine in tea (which is already much lower than coffee and soda). This has been backed up by clinical studies referenced in the book.

Also, as we have covered before, green tea in particular contains EGCG, which increases the rate and efficiency of fat burning.

What about the diet part of it?

The author recommends eating 3 meals a day, and sticking with low fat and moderate carbohydrates, but no processed white carbs. Avoiding white carbs like rice and sugar is an excellent idea, but this is where Healthy Mind Fit Body will part with the Ultimate Tea Diet.

While the tea certainly can be a useful supplement to a healthy diet, ideally, you would want to eat much more fat that what Dr. Tea recommends. By going with a low fat diet, you are missing out on some important nutrients, as well as some tasty foods!

So my assessment is:

+ on the tea
+ on cutting out of the bad, processed carbs
– cutting down on fat

So drink up, but do not skimp on your fat intake!

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