Life is filled with friendly reminders.

A few weeks before your car needs a check-up, you get a postcard in the mail. A few days before a doctor's visit, you get a call from the receptionist.If you're like me, 99 out of 100 times you don't really need the friendly reminder. But that one other time, the time you forgot to add the appointment to your calendar, the friendly reminder becomes something much more.Figuratively speaking, it's a life saver.Today's column serves a similar purpose. For those who make health and fitness a priority, this column may be, in fact, nothing more than the typical friendly reminder.But for the forgetful, it will have greater value. And for a few of those, this column may transform from a figurative life saver into a type far more important.A literal one.The topic at hand: the inherent goodness in green tea. The reason for the "friendly reminder" intro: the topic has been featured a few times before.But researchers keep finding more benefits to drinking the stuff, so I'll keep writing more columns about it.Some of the studies in the past have found that drinking green tea regularly protects against many types of cancers, including bladder, breast, colorectal, esophageal, lung, pancreatic, prostate, skin, and stomach. Others have shown that the good stuff in green tea reduces the risk of cavities, high cholesterol, heart disease, and viral infection. And a few have suggested that drinking green tea limits the adverse effects of menopause, arthritis, and asthma.All of that has been established in decades past, but more has been discovered in the current one: for instance, greater insight into how, why, and to what extent drinking green tea aids weight loss.By isolating a key compound, EGCG, a study published in 1999 by the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition demonstrated that the weight loss benefits found in green tea come from more than the relatively modest amount of caffeine consumed (no more than 50 milligrams) with each cup. Adding 90 milligrams of EGCG, properly known as the polyphenol epigallocatechin-3-gallate, to 50 grams of caffeine burned significantly more calories after a meal in subjects who received both as opposed to subjects only receiving the caffeine or a placebo.Earlier this decade, Penn State researchers added EGCG to a high-fat diet fed to obese mice and found what was expected based on the 1999 study: that these obese mice gained less weight than mice fed a high-fat diet without it. They also gained weight at a slower pace, 45 percent slower.The reason is found in what the mice left behind. Their fecal matter.The droppings of the obese mice given EGCG contained 30 percent more fat, leading the researchers to theorize that EGCG to some degree limits fat absorption. The researchers also believe that the added EGCG made it easier to use stored body fat for energy.Follow-up work performed at Penn State and published by 2014 confirmed the final belief, finding mice receiving EGCG in their diet lost 36 percent more belly fat as did mice eating the same diet without the EGCG supplement.Another worthy finding from this decade suggests green tea consumption could benefit those with any of the cluster of symptoms that often cause type 2 diabetes, known as metabolic syndrome, or those already afflicted with the disease. In this study published in 2012 by Molecular Nutrition & Food Research, mice were given four types of sugar after a fasting period. After another fast, they were given the same sugars with EGCG added.When mice received EGCG along with corn starch, their blood sugar level peak was only half of what it was without the supplement, leading the researchers to suggest that similar experiments with humans were warranted.The study that could be the literal life saver was also performed at Penn State. Earlier this year, a team headed by associate profession of food science Josh Lambert announced that EGCG killed oral cancer cells by damaging the mitochondria in the cancerous cells enough to cause their eventual death. The EGCG, however, did not repeat, not adversely affect the mitochondria in healthy cells in any way. In fact, it seemed to protect those cells.In addition, the same group of Penn State researchers allayed a potential fear about constantly using EGCG as a weight-loss aid: that as a supplement taken in mass amounts it might be toxic to the liver.Ironically, what reduced liver toxicity by 75 percent in mice before being overloaded with EGCG was a pretreatment of low levels of EGCG for two weeks before the three-day experiment. As a result, Josh Lambert told Jeff Mulhollem for an article posted at the Penn State website that "Drinking green tea rather than taking [green tea or EGCG] supplements will allow you to realize the benefits and avoid the risk of liver toxicity." Lambert went on to explain that while liver toxicity has been reported in people taking EGCG as a supplement, no liver toxicity has been reported in green tea drinkers, despite the fact that many people consume up to 20 cups a day.