Decaf Green Tea - Does It Offer The Same Health Benefits As Regular Green Tea?
This is a hard question to answer. I personally drink plain ol' caffeinated green tea which still contains much less caffeine than coffee, and I rather like the slight caffeine buzz.
But as far as whether or not decaffeinated green tea keeps its health benefits after going through the decaffeinating process there isn't a clear answer.
The research I did had people claiming it did, and some saying it didn't
I should note that the people saying that decaffeinated green tea offered the same benefits as regular tea were the tea manufactures themselves so this hardly qualifies as an unbiased source of information.
Of the tea enthusiasts who discussed this topic their consensus was that it did lose much of the healthy benefits along with taste (decaf green tea is almost unheard of in Japan because of the lack of taste)
I even found this question had been asked on Google Answers decaf green tea, but even the mighty Google couldn't give a definitive answer.
Common sense tells me that Yes - any green tea that goes through the decaffeinating process will lose some of its helpful polyphenols and EGCG, but how much I'm not sure.
Here's a tip if you want to decaffeinate your regular green tea at home you can just steep the tea for 30 seconds, remove it and disregard that cup and place the tea in a new cup of hot water. This will remove most of the caffeine.