White Tea and Weight Loss - Get the Skinny!

If reducing that abdominal paunch is one of your goals for this upcoming bikini season, you might seriously consider adding white tea to your diet. Concern over increases in obesity-related diseases prompted research into the effects of white tea extract on the human body. The findings, published last month in Nutrition & Metabolism, found that white tea extract effectively inhibits adipogenesis (the production of fat) AND stimulates lipolysis (the destruction of fats). Even Dr. Oz, Oprah's wellness guru, recommended recently that "you should drink about four cups of green or white tea a day", which propelled "white tea" to the highest-searched tea term on the Internet overnight! Ahh, the power of Oprah... All this twitter around white tea and weight loss has prompted us to do some more digging to bring you a summary of the facts.

TRUTH or MYTH:

• Simply adding white tea to your diet will help you lose weight - MYTH

• White tea will assist your body in inhibiting the production of fat cells - TRUTH

• White tea provides a boost to exercise-induced weight loss, further stimulating the destruction of fat through exercise - TRUTH

• The caffeine in white tea helps you burn fat by speeding up your metabolism - MYTH

• White tea often contains the least amount of caffeine of all teas. It's the polyphenol antioxidant EGCG that helps inhibit fat cell production - TRUTH

• White tea is a natural appetite suppressant - TRUTH - And of course, "the weight loss will be even better if the tea is unsweetened and if it's replacing caloric beverages such as soda," suggests Shawn Talbott, author and producer of Killer at Large, a documentary exploring the causes of and the solutions of the American obesity epidemic.

So go ahead and make white tea your new BFF!