Hypolipidemic effect of Youcha in hyperlipidemia rats induced by high-fat diet

Youcha is a novel tea drink from the northeast of Guangxi. This study aimed to investigate the hypolipidemic properties of Youcha in high-fat induced hyperlipidemic Sprague-Dawley (SD) rats. After designing the model, rats were randomly divided into six groups (n = 10): normal diet (NMD) group, high-fat diet (HFD) group, Xuezhikang (120 mg kg^-1 d^-1) (HFD+P) group and Youcha (150, 750 or 1500 mg kg^-1 d^-1) (HFD+L, HFD+M or HFD+H) groups. Youcha comprises tea polyphenols (1.51 g per 100 g), caffeine (34.80 mg per 100 g) and other functional compounds. To evaluate the lipid-lowering effects of Youcha, weight of the body, liver and fat, fat index, lipid metabolism, antioxidant properties and liver damage indices were examined. In addition, the activities of some enzymes in serum and liver tissue were examined to preliminarily study their possible mechanism. The results reveal that Youcha tends to reduce body weight, liver weight, fat index, total cholesterol (TC) and triglyceride (TG) contents, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C), atherogenic index (AI), malondialdehyde (MDA), aspartate aminotransferase (AST) and alanine aminotransferase (ALT), and increase high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and glutathione peroxidase (GPx) relative to the HFD group. The hypolipidemic effect was partly due to the regulation of fatty acid synthetase (FAS) and lipase (LPS) rather than lipoprotein lipase (LPL) to decrease TG markedly. These findings suggest that Youcha could be potentially used to remedy hyperlipidemia and is hence worthy of promotion as a tea drink.