Green Tea for Muscle Protection? GTE Increases Satellite Cell Proliferation & Differentiation, Slows Disuse-Related Atrophy, Does not Promote Hypertrophy in Aged Rodents
Green tea as a magical muscle preservative for injured athletes? "GTE increased satellite cell proliferation and differentiation, decreased oxidative stress and the abundance of Bax, a proapoptotic protein" (Alway. 2014) - that's the initially exciting result of a recent study from the West Virginia University School of Medicine and Abbott Laboratories . What is not exactly as exciting, though, is how the sentence continues, i.e. "yet this did not further improve muscle recovery in reloaded muscles" (Alway. 2014). Sounds contradictory, right? Well, before we get deeper into the discussion of the results, let's briefly recap how Alway et al. arrived at these insights, i.e. how exactly the experiment looked like and which experimental evidence it generated. The scientists from the West Virginia University School of Medicine tested the hypothesis that green tea extract (GTE) would improve muscle recovery after reloading following disuse. In men and wo...