Why is caffeine such a confusing subject when it comes to tea?
Everywhere I look there are widely varying reports and recommendations for how much caffeine you might ingest when drinking tea. I think the reason this is so confusing is not because there are different levels of caffeine in different teas, but because all these sites seem to want to measure it in relation to the fluid you drink, rather than the caffeine content of the dry tea leaves themselves.
Here is a new paradigm, please let me know your thoughts if you think this is accurate:
I have read several sites that do seem to agree caffeine content varies from about 1.5% to 4.5% of dry tea leaf weight. So, if you have one gram of dry tea, and you wanted a conservative estimate of 4.5%, you could assume that one gram of tea (1000mg) contains 45mg of caffeine.
If you were to literally eat the tea leaf dry without steeping it at all, you would be ingesting 45mg of caffeine.
So it seems pretty straightforward to me that if you wanted a conservative estimate of how much caffeine you were getting in one day drinking tea, you could multiply 45mg of caffeine by however many grams of tea you are using per day to get “X” and make a broad claim that you are getting “less than X mg of caffeine per day” because its obvious not all the caffeine will be released from the leaves through steeping, and unless you are always drinking the absolute highest caffeine content tea at 4.5%, you are probably getting less anyway.
So for me, I use about 9 grams of green tea per day and re-steep the heck out of them until I have little more than colored water by the last steep. I could confidently say “I ingest less than 405mg of caffene per day”, and in reality probably ingest much less because most of that 9 grams is gunpowder and kukicha, which have lower caffeine content than other teas.
Thoughts?
All I could say on the topic, Camellia Sinensis has done the science for. The variables are wide and seemingly endless. Every little detail matters. Such as, when it was harvested, where the tea is from, how much sun it got during the growing period, etc.
Thanks. It seems that all of that data confirms my thoughts. Rather than try to identify the exact amount of caffeine one is getting per day, my approach is simply meant to be a tool for people who are trying to stay under a certain caffeine threshold per day (300mg per day seems to be a recommended ceiling for healthy adults).
Well, there is another variable.
I seem to not have any issues when drinking caffeine in soda. Well, If I drink it late in the day, I don’t sleep, but that is different from how I deal with caffeine in tea.
With tea, it is different
I agree with @rwblue01, although, for me, the big difference is between caffeine in coffee vs. tea. Tea leaves, in addition to having caffeine, also have polyphenols which act as buffers for the caffeine, so you get a steady stream of the caffeine rather than the jolt that you get from coffee.
I don’t drink soda so I don’t know about caffeine in soda.
I think it would be nice if science could accurately say the nutrition information for all foods and drinks. It’s also entirely impractical. Every apple you eat doesn’t have the exact same amount of fibre, calories, etc. Every tea you drink doesn’t have the same polyphenols, caffeine, etc. There are general guidelines that we follow (such as nutrition information for food) but they aren’t a guarantee.
With tea, there is a lot of misinformation regarding caffeine. I have always assumed that interested companies began that information, but I have no proof. I think that if an individual is concerned about caffeine content, they should guess high. Your formula sounds simple enough, though generous, as you say. As long as the individual considers all tea as being caffeinated, he or she should be okay. The belief that black tea has the most caffeine has been proven to be false, so I recommend treating all tea as “heavily” caffeinated IF caffeine content is a concern.
all I know is that I can only drink my average of 1.5 liters of tea per day if I don’t drink coffee too. If I do that the caffeine keeps me awake.
I ran the numbers too as I was going through episodes of A-Fib and had to be careful with caffeine.
After way too much research, I concluded that I can estimate 20-25 mgs of caffeine per gram of tea as an average. Most healthy people can hover around 200mgs total caffeine per day, although we know that many are probably in the 300+ range.
I like to stay in the 100-150 range which means I can have about 5 grams of tea per day. Or I go heavier and then resteep over a couple days to average it out.
For those that don’t think there’s as much caffeine or the caffeine is different, I used to think the same. Until a couple times I had to quit cold turkey and then started suffering caffeine withdrawals. Based on how most people drink tea (big pots or small servings through out the day), you’d be surprised how much caffeine you get.
I won’t get into the science of the other components maybe counteracting or slowing down the intake of caffeine, but trust me, you’re getting caffeine and probably more than you think.
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