Green tea caffeine

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.