Sunday Sept 29, 2013 (foodconsumer.org) -- A new study in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine suggests that dietary cocoa tea (Camellia ptilophylla) supplementation can help weight loss just as well as green tea does.

Xiao Rong Yang from Yili Normal University in Yining, Xinjiang, China and colleagues conducted the study and found dietary cocoa tea not only led to weigh loss in mice on a high fat diet but also caused a dose-dependent decrease in fat pad mass, liver weight, total liver lipid, liver triglyceride and cholesterol, and plasma lipids (triglyceride and cholesterol) in study mice.  All the benefits from cocoa tea are comparable to those of green tea.

In the study, mice were fed on a high fat diet with or without green tea or cocoa tea supplemented in a dose of 2% or 4% in the diets.

The study suggests that drinking cocoa tea can not only prevent high fat diet induced obesity or help weight loss, but also prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease or hepatic steatosis, and hyperlipiddemia.

One good thing about dietary cocoa tea is that it is naturally decaffeinated while green tea contains caffeine which imposes some limitation on its use.  The researchers suggest that dietary cocoa tea may be used to replace green tea as a weight loss diet supplement.

Cocoa tea belongs to the genus Camellia and has been widely used in people in the Longmen area of Guangdong Province in China, according to the researchers.

In addition to having an effect on weight loss, cocoa tea extract also inhibits the growth of various cancer cells such as prostate cancer cells both in vitro and in vivo.   The authors of the current study found early that HepG2 xenograft nude mice fed cocoa tea extract experienced a dose-dependent decrease in tumor growth via caspase-3-regulated pathway. (DL)