Long‐term drinking of green tea combined with exercise improves hepatic steatosis and obesity in male mice induced by high‐fat diet

Abstract

Abstract Dietary habits and exercise play an important role in the well‐being of human health. Currently, how long of drinking tea combined with exercise could efficiently ameliorate hepatic steatosis and obesity still needs to be investigated. Here, short‐term and long‐term green tea drinking combined with exercise were studied to improve hepatic steatosis and obesity in high‐fat diet‐induced (HF) mice. Our results showed that Yunkang 10 green tea (GT) combined with exercise (Ex) exhibited synergistic prevention effects on ameliorating hepatic steatosis and obesity. Especially, 22‐week intervention with GT or Ex improved all symptoms of obesity, which indicated that long‐term intervention exhibited profound preventive effects than the short term. Moreover, the combined intervention of 22 weeks inhibited the activation of NF‐κB pathway and the expression of proinflammatory cytokines, which suggests that tea combined exercise may improve liver steatosis mainly by inhibiting inflammation. The key molecules for regulating lipid and glucose metabolism SCD1 were obviously downregulated, and GLU2 and PPARγ were significantly upregulated by GT and exercise in the liver of high‐fat diet‐induced mice. This study demonstrated that long‐term intervention with GT and exercise effectively relieved hepatic steatosis and obesity complications by ameliorating hepatic inflammation, reducing lipid synthesis, and accelerating glucose transport.

Keywords

• hepatic steatosis
• inflammation
• NF‐κB
• obesity
• treadmill exercise
• Yunkang 10 green tea (GT)