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AOR Active Green Tea EGCG Max Review
AOR Active Green Tea EGCG Max is a high dose green tea extract aiming to give you 10 cups of high-EGCG sencha green tea a day.
Advanced Orthomolecular Research (AOR) is a Canadian based company specializing in the production of nutraceuticals. Dr. Traj Nibber founded the company after trying and failing to find credibility and quality amongst existing dietary supplement companies.
They have been in business for over 15 years. It is a GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) certified company. Their aim is to produce highly efficient supplements through the use of research and are able to back their products with scientific literature.
According to the Active Green Tea EGCG Max, "nearly all green tea extract capsules contain only a fraction of the green tea cup-equivalents than their manufacturers claim." This is how they explain it:
These companies aren’t flat-out lying, but they are 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.
This is all very good stuff. I agree that numerous studies have shown that one cup of high grade green tea that is harvested early spring can contain 300 milligrams of catechins, of which half (150 milligrams) is EGCG.
However, it is not clear why AOR thinks that one needs to drink as many as 10 cups of these high grade tea to get sufficient health benefits out of it.
Most population studies looking at health benefits of green tea are looking people drinking 3-6 cups of tea a day, not 10 cups a day. In fact, both me and my wife are Orientals are we hardly know anyone drinking that many cups of green tea a day!
To quote further from them:
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.
800 to 1600 milligrams of EGCG per day are the doses that are being used in the human clinical trials that have begun in the last few years.
Now this makes more sense. What happens if you are suffering from cancer and your doctor recommends you taking high doses of tea catechins?
Chemical Composition
In one capsule:
Green Tea (Camellia sinesis) Extract….700 mg
Total catechins…………………………455 mg
EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate)……….315 mg
ECg (epicatechin gallate)……………… 75 mg
EGC (epigallocatechin)……………….. 30 mg
EC (epichtechin)……………………… 35 mg
Caffeine………………………………. 7 mg
Recommendations
There is a small (1%) amount of caffeine, which is a plus because moderate consumption of caffeine has been found to be beneficial and at this low level it is unlikely to cause problems for most people.
Tea Caffeine Benefits - Can It Be Good For You?
Also, this products contains all four catechins and that is positive as these tea compounds do create synergies when acting together.
The manufacturer recommends taking three capsules a day with or without food, which total to 1,365 milligrams of green tea catechins a day.
This will appeal to those of you who want to take large doses of green tea extract for clinical reasons e.g. Chronic Lymphacytic Leukemia.
However, as I have explained in the Green Tea Supplement Side Effects article, most manufacturers uses an organic solvent to create green tea extract, which when taken in large quantity can cause liver poisoning.
I have emailed AOR to ask them to clarify their extraction method and they say they use both ethanol and water, which probably mean this product is not suitable for consumption in large doses.
There is also no mention that the product is herbicide and pesticide free.
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