[.ca] Green Tea: Health Benefits and Applications (ISBN 0824704703)

The science of green tea in understandable prose:
Dr. Yukihiko Hara was the first to purify green tea catechins on a larger scale. As Director of the Food Research Laboratories at Mitsui Norin Co, he and his colleagues worked in their extra time to purify these compounds and make them available in the late 1980's. The methods they developed are used today to purify the green tea extracts available from pills to shampoo. This book reports on their scientific efforts exploring the activity of the catechins and reviews the work of others in the field. It is clearly written in layman's language with many illustrations. Key areas covered include where catechins come from and how they are purified, anti-oxidant and radical scavenging in food products and animals. Their tests, mostly in animals of the anti-bacterial action, the anti-viral action and the anti-cancer action, are reported in the next few chapters. Each chapter describes the experiments in sufficient detail so you can evaluate the meaning of the effect. There are further chapters on health effects in humans, including fat reduction and improved bowel function, help for diabetes and also hypertension, backed up by straightforward experiments. He ends with a general discussion of trends in the field. Much of this work was done by Dr. Hara's group and close collaborators, so the original papers were published in Japanese; for many experiments this book is the only way to read about them in English. Green Tea Catechins are now studied around the world, but the quantities needed originated in this lab and he has supplied the catechins other scientists have used for most of that work. Mitsui Norin purified the catechins sold at Sigma Chemicals until this last year. Currently Dr. Hara's group has a collaborative research effort with the US National Cancer Institute to test the anti-cancer effects of green tea catechins in people with precancerous lesions. The book provides the background one needs to appreciate this effort and gives the history of the science leading up to the NCI trials in a convenient way. Dr. John Weisburger, the distinguished research scientist from the Americal Health Foundation, has written a helpful foreword.