Tea Gives Big Boost To Insulin
Common tea
can be an effective weapon in the fight against diabetes because it boosts
insulin activity in the body by more than 15-fold, scientists at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture said.
Insulin problems
lie at the root of the potentially fatal illness diabetes, so researchers
hope tea-based treatments will help treat or prevent the disease, which
affects 17 million Americans. Not only that, this insulin-boosting phenomenon
may explain why tea can help fight heart disease and high blood pressure
as well.
"This is just
one of the many well-established benefits that tea may have," researcher
Richard Anderson, a biochemist at the USDA's Beltsville Human Nutrition
Research Center in Maryland, told United Press International.
Tea has a long
history as a folk remedy for diabetes in China, the West Indies and central
Africa. Over the past 20 years scientists also have uncovered potential
benefits from tea against cancer, high blood pressure and infection.
"Tea wasn't
the only factor we looked at, but it was the best," Anderson said.
Anderson and
his colleague Marilyn Polansky analyzed a host of herbs, spices and plants
for any beneficial effect involving insulin, the hormone the body needs
to convert sugar into energy. They took fat cells from rats and grew them
in test tubes because fat cells are highly sensitive to insulin, Anderson
explained. Then, they gave the cells mildly radioactive sugar, insulin,
and various tea extracts. The radioactive sugar is easy to track and the
more the extracts aided insulin activity, the more sugar the cells would
convert.
The scientists
found black, green and oolong teas boosted insulin activity the most. This
insulin-augmenting effect was seen with both caffeinated and non-caffeinated
teas, but not with herbal teas, which do not use leaves from tea bushes.
They also identified
tea's most insulin-enhancing chemical, called epigallocatechin gallate.
Adding whole or skim milk, nondairy creamers or soy milk appears to soak
up tea's insulin-augmenting compounds and inhibit the insulin boost, although
these milky sponges may release the tea extracts in the stomach, Anderson
said. No absorption problem was seen with lemon juice.
"Hopefully
people can get better simply by drinking tea," Anderson said. "These compounds
clear from the body quite quickly, some in less than six hours, some less
than four. The effects are not going to be that large, so you're going
to need to continue drinking tea."
Anderson said
his team also found cinnamon showed similar insulin-enhancing power. He
suggests tea and cinnamon affects the cell proteins insulin binds to.
Diabetes is
a disease where the body either does not make insulin or does not properly
use it when it does produce it. The scientists think tea increases the
body's sensitivity to insulin by setting off a chain reaction. As a result,
the body attaches chemicals to insulin-binding proteins that enhance their
activity.
Tea's insulin-boosting
activity also might explain why tea seems to help prevent heart disease
and high blood pressure, Anderson said. Medical investigators think high
blood sugar damages blood vessels, and increasing insulin activity lowers
blood sugar levels.
"This work
seems to be truly new and extremely exciting," biochemist Anne-Marie Roussel
at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble, France, told UPI.
"This work is well done, and the data is promising not only to treat diabetes
but perhaps also in preventing it." Roussel and Anderson added more tea
studies need to be conducted with patients, not in lab models.
The scientists
described their findings in a report published online by the Journal of
Agricultural and Food Chemistry.
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Copyright 2002 by United
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