Not to be mistaken for green tea, green coffee extract is being shown to significantly increase metabolic rates and help people lose weight — even without diet and exercise. Is this another fad diet, or something to really look into?
Just when you were feeling particularly green by drinking green tea as part of your diet regimen, now green coffee extract is making its way onto the diet scene. And unlike green tea, this stuff is actually showing to be effective.
what is green coffee? no, its not some environmentally-friendly bean, or some ultra-exotic variety from the inaccessible mountains of Ecuador. Rather, it is simply an unroasted coffee bean. “Green coffee” is a term long used by coffee producers as the raw product, before it has been roasted and processed into the coffee that know, love, and are addicted to. You may not know it, but the process of making coffee is among the most complex and laborious in the entire agriculture industry. Coffee beans are actually found within a coffee plant’s berry. This means that the berries have to be picked, the bean needs to be removed from the fruit (the fruit, by the way, is also said to have nutritional benefits), dried, and then roasted to varying degrees. Only then does it become the coffee bean that we brew with.
The problem, however, is that the roasting process also takes away all of the benefits of coffee. This is why leading coffee research has suggested that the less roasted your coffee is, the more beneficial it can be to your heath. And this is precisely why green coffee is being found to produce health benefits: it remains all of the nutritional and medicinal qualities of the original “green” coffee bean.
Quoting a recent study conducted by the ACS, i09 states: “The study used doses of an extract of unroasted (green) coffee beans, with low doses of 700mg, and high ones of 1,050mg. The research was small in scope, just 16 obese people over the course of 22 weeks, all of whom acted as their own placebos, alternating between low-dose, high-dose, and an inactive supplement, each for a third of the time. With no changes to diet or exercise, at the end of the 22 weeks, the participants had lost an average of 17 lbs, dropping 16% of their body fat.”
What’s particularly interesting about this study is that the participants only took the green coffee extract 50% of the time — the other 50%, they took a placebo. This means that if the participants had taken the extract every day, their weight loss could have doubled. And if a dieter used green coffee with a diet plan, maybe even more?
Interestingly enough, it appears that green coffee extract basically works as a kind of natural sugar and carb blocker. The effects of the extract “are due to chlorogenic acid, which is thought to reduce the absorption of glucose and lessen hyperglycemic peak.” So, one can imagine how this newfangled diet supplement could actually work quite well with a low carb diet.