Green tea caffeine
Green tea contains
caffeine, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
However, the link between green tea caffeine and
regular caffeine is not as strong as you might think,
because green tea contains far less caffeine than coffee
or even black tea. Josie, a nutritionist friend of mine,
told me that three or four cups of green tea contain
approximately the same dose of caffeine as one cup
of coffee. Nonetheless, caffeine can cause problems if
taken in large doses.
Uh-oh,
my 4 year old niece has been reading this over my
shoulder and wants to know exactly what caffeine is.
Patiently, I explain that caffeine is a bitter alkaloid
compound found naturally in coffee, tea, and kola nuts.
It is also used medicinally as a stimulant and a
diuretic. I want to tell her the chemical formula for
caffeine
(C8H10N4O2),
but she’s lost interest.
Anyway,
where was I? Right, given the properties of caffeine, it
is obvious that those who suffer from heart or kidney
problems and anxiety should take green tea after
consulting their physician first. The same goes for
pregnant and breastfeeding women. And caffeine reacts
with several common prescription drugs, including heart
and blood pressure drugs, sedatives, oral contraceptives,
anti-depressants, and drugs that affect blood clotting,
such as aspirin. So if you are on any of these
medications, make sure you consult your physician
first.
I can
see many of you blithely advocating decaffeinated green
tea, for such a thing does exist, of course. The trouble
is, even decaf green tea has a very small amount of
caffeine, like 0.4%, so that you can’t entirely banish it
from your life. What you can do, of course, is regulate
the amount of caffeine that you take in with your cuppa
regular green tea. Josie my nutritionist friend tells me
that the amount of caffeine you ingest depends on how
long your tea is brewed, the size of the leaves, and what
part of the tea plant the leaf/bud comes from. Basically,
tea bags have smaller leaves or leaf fragments, which
produce more caffeine when brewed.
However,
if you feel that is too much to bother with, check out
the green tea offered
here. I found that the
folks here offer a form of green tea that they call the
Green Tea300 Instant
Beverage as I mentioned on
the greentea 300 page. Green tea caffeine poses
less of a threat in this case, because each packet of
this instant beverage contains about 63mg of caffeine,
which is at least 50-70% lower than a cup of instant
coffee, to give you just one example.
By my
calculations, this means that you can drink about five
cups a day to limit your green tea caffeine consumption
to about 300 mg. Most nutrition experts and doctors
advise against crossing the danger limit of around 600 mg
per day. However, I have seen my share of
over-enthusiastic folks who think more is always good. So
remember green tea caffeine intake in moderation
is optimal.
Green Tea
Extract
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