Side effects of green tea

Find out what are the side effects of green tea and what you need to do so you will enjoy all the health benefits of green tea without any side effect.

Drinking freshly brewed green tea plentifully, is the drink of choice on the Japanese Okinawa Islands, where people tend to healthy grow older than 100 years. This doesn’t prove anything, but illustrates that following the Okinawa diet works well for those people to keep healthy and to grow very old.

Personally, I never encountered any side effects, except for the inconvenience for going a few times more to the toilet than others. But what is this so called inconvenience all about:

• you are getting rid of extra fluids your body isn’t using
• and for couch potatoes: any excuse to get you up and walking is an added benefit.

As crazy as it sounds, some smart marketers found a solution for that inconvenience by concentrating the green tea into an extract.

Caffeine side effects

Most of the noted green tea problems are caused by the caffeine in the tea. Green tea contains a few times less caffeine compared to normal tea and coffee. So when normal tea nor coffee don’t cause you any problems, you can easily substitute those with green tea.

Apart that caffeine can easily keep you awake at night, other side effects that have been noted are:

• headache,
• heart palpitations: this can be a serious problem: e.g. my wife can’t finish a strong brew of coffee without noticeable consequences, but evry morning she does drink a cup of green tea for breakfast without any problems
• restlessness,
• vomiting and nausea,
• diarrhea or the opposite: constipation.

People already suffering from heart problems, stomach ulcers, kidney disorders and psychological disorders are easier at risk for the above negative effects.

If you are unsure, do ask your doctor’s or dietitian’s opinion about how a green tea (or an even more concentrated extract) could interfere with any other medications you take or with health problems you have.

Just like getting around the diuretic inconvenience, you can also get around the caffeine inconvenience when you by a caffeine free extract. Just make sure that when it mentions "caffeine free", there is zero caffeine involved (unlike decaffeinated coffee, still containing about 1/10 of the original amount of caffeine)

Always remember that green tea is part of Chinese medicine promoting a lifestyle where your health is approached as a whole, where prevention is key and where the tea is used to boost your immune system. Side effects of green tea are unknown in the Okinawa lifestyle, but be aware of your overal caffeine consumption and tolerance.