haiti has this has gone from a leaf in this video caffeine in tea facts and myths in this video i'm going to be giving you all the information that you need about caffeine in tea and we're going to be debunking a few commonly told myths this video is going to go under the basic tea education playlist if any point in time you enjoyed this video then please give the video the thumbs up the more thumbs in the air the more tea videos are going to come your way and if you haven't subscribed to our youtube channel yet then go click that button we are in cosas met a couple of hours drive away from bangkok we managed to steal away a few days holiday but the videos must go on and so i thought today we would have a little tour around the island and i would be giving you as much knowledge as i possibly can about caffeine in tea this is one of the most requested videos so i thought it was about time to get this knowledge over to you one quick disclaimer the information that i'm going to give you is based on the latest studies that I have found I'll put links in the to the studies in the description below but this is an area which is continuously changing there are no hard and fast rules and the area is very very complex if you have any comments or you have any other information then please do share and I will try to update the description below or if you're watching this on our mailee website then i'll put the information in the blog post below okay let's go explore this beautiful island and learn about caffeine in tea firstly what is caffeine and what does it do caffeine is by far the most widely consumed psychoactive drug in the world it exists naturally in over 60 plants including the cocoa bean but it's most widely consumed in coffee and in tea caffeine is a class of compound called methyl xanthine and it is a stimulant its primary stimulant effect is that it attaches to receptors in your brain that are reserved for adenosine as you burn energy in the form of ATP or adenosine triphosphate a byproduct is adenosine so throughout the day adenosine levels build up and they attach to receptors in your brain and that leads to a feeling of sleepiness because caffeine mimics the shape of identity it can attach to those receptors in place of adenosine and therefore it can relieve feelings of sleepiness therefore the beneficial effects of caffeine are to increase cognitive abilities to relieve fatigue enhanced performance and endurance the negative side effects of excessive intake of caffeine are jitters anxiety elevated blood pressure and it can stiffen blood vessels so let's move to our first myth the first myth is that caffeine is always bad for you the fact is that moderate intake of caffeine can have a moderate protective effect against certain diseases such as coronary heart disease Parkinson's and some types of cancer so it is not all bad news as long as you keep your caffeine levels in check so how much caffeine is too much caffeine well this is not so simple because everybody metabolized is caffeine at a different rate and you can build up tolerance to caffeine if you drink more of it but general guidelines are about 400 to 500 milligrams per day is a safe upper daily limit if you're pregnant then that drops to about 150 to 200 milligrams per day the children caffeine is not suitable for anybody under the age of 4 and once you go past the age of 4 then the calculation is about 1 milligram per 2 point 5 kilograms of body weight once an adult gets to about a thousand milligrams today then Singh starts again serious and at 10,000 milligrams it can be lethal I'll talk about how that relates to tea and coffee in a second but let's debunk a myth first there is a myth that T is dehydrating because caffeine is a diuretic now caffeine is a diuretic in other words it stimulates you to go and urinate but it's a mild diuretic and the amount of water in pee and coffee vastly outweighs this diuretic function so tea is actually very hydrating not dehydrating I hope we can finally put that myth to bed [Music] so how much caffeine is in tea and coffee in coffee and average espresso shot is about 70 to 80 milligrams of caffeine and an average cup of coffee is somewhere in the region of about 120 milligrams of caffeine obviously there's variation above and below that so in order to reach your 400 to 500 milligram daily maximum allowance you can't really be drinking more than three or four cups of coffee tea as we will soon find out is much more complicated to work out the caffeine content because of the variety of types the way that it's processed and the way that it's brewed but as a general rule an average cup of tea is between about 10 and 60 milligrams of caffeine and so in order to reach your maximum daily allowance you're looking at something in the region of 8 cups of tea even if it is the most strong in caffeine but the effects of caffeine in tea and in coffee are different on the human body the primary reason for that is feeling feeling is an amino acid which pretty much exclusively exists in tea it crosses the blood-brain barrier and affects your mood it's a very powerful psychoactive substance it increases your feelings of relaxation it increases alpha brainwave activity which leads to a more meditative state and studies have shown that seeming in combination with caffeine act synergistically to enhance the positive aspects of caffeine in other words the improvement in cognitive awareness cognitive ability and performance but reduces the negative effects of caffeine like anxiety and jitteriness also studies have shown that EGCG and polyphenol contents empty can modulate the effects of caffeine it is thought that it does this by reducing or slowing down the uptake of caffeine and therefore you get more of a time-release stimulant effect versus drinking caffeine in coffee which has a very quick on and quit off and that means that it affects your nervous system and it means that you have an energy dump which leaves you craving another cup of coffee so whilst caffeine is the same in tea and in coffee it has markedly different effects which leads me to my next myth and that is that tea does not contain caffeine but instead contains peeing or seen when caffeine was first discovered in tea it was called teen but it is exactly the same molecule is exactly the same chemical so this myth that teen is different from caffeine is simply not true caffeine exists in both tea and in coffee and they are identical so how much caffeine actually exists in the Tea Leaf about one to five percent of the weight of the tea leaf is Kathy and this wide variation of one to five percent really depends on a variety of factors that makes this area quite complex the tea plant makes caffeine because it is toxic to insects so it protects the plant against being bitten by insects it is produced in the bud and the very young leaves because these are the parts of the plant that are tender and soft and more likely to be bitten by insects so it's certainly true that if your tea comes from pickings of the bugs and the very first leaf then it is more likely to have higher levels of caffeine and as you move down the plant lower leaves contain less Kathy also the season of when it's picked has an effect summer means more insects and so the plant produces more caffeine so summer pick teas will have a tendency for higher caffeine compared to spring picked teas the variety of the tea plant makes a big difference to a Sumiko varieties will have higher caffeine content than sinensis varieties and clonal teas will have higher caffeine rather than seed grown teas also if you shade grow the teas as in Japanese yorkers and tension to make matcha then you increase the cat content other than that the processing of the tea plant and the level of caffeine is very very unclear there are some tentative studies that have been done that show that the longer you wither the tea the higher the caffeine content slightly there are some studies that show that if you oxidize the tea for longer so the period of oxidation may reduce the caffeine content slightly there are also some studies that show that roasting the teeth may reduce caffeine content slightly although I have to say that these studies are very very tentative they're very small-scale and if you look at coffee and how the roast doesn't actually affect the caffeine content of coffee I questioned those studies quite considerably which moves us on to our next myth many tea sellers out there try to give you clients real hard and fast rules by saying that white tea has the lowest amount of caffeine followed by green tea etc they may say black tea has the highest amount of caffeine everyone is contradicting themselves the point is that there are no hard and fast rules you can have high content high caffeine content green tea you can have low caffeine content green tea there are no hard and fast rules it's important that tea sellers give you accurate information if you want to make very broad generalizations then tea that's made from the tips and the buds will have a tendency to have higher caffeine and that relates to green teas and black teas and teas that are made from lower leaves will have a tendency to have a lower caffeine and that moves you more into along teas from independent studies that we are done sending our tea into labs it is certainly being true that along teas tend to reside in that lower caffeine area a quick word about decaffeinated teas decaffeinated decaffeination of teas is an industrial process using a solvent ether either ethyl acetate or supercritical co2 which is a solvent that strips out the caffeine but also strips out a lot of other good stuff in terms of health benefits and that I would stay well away from decaffeinated tea so how can you control how much caffeine actually ends up in the cup well the wonderful thing about loose leaf tea is that unlike coffee which is ground up you have a lot of control of the amount of caffeine that you extract in the brewing process of course I'm not talking about teabags here teabags are commonly made with broken leaf and tea dust which extract very very quickly so you don't have the control and in fact it will produce a stronger and more likely very high caffeine tea if you are sticking to loosely then you have for brewing parameters that can control the amount of caffeine that you're drinking the first is the amount of leaves the more leaf you use the higher the caffeine is going to be the second is the length of your steeping time the shorter your steeping time the lower your caffeine is going to be the third is the amount of times that you drink in other words the amount of infusions that you consume more infusions means you're going to be drinking more of the caffeine and lastly temperature of water is paramount boiling hot water will extract much more caffeine than cooler water which is probably why green tea is commonly thought of as a lower caffeine drink because because it is traditionally brewed with lower temperature water of course I am NOT referring to match it here because matcha is a powder and you're consuming the entire leaf you are getting all of the caffeine and you have no control in the brewing process a shot of matcha gives you about 17 milligrams of caffeine what about Western versus gone through star brewing well with Western brewing you'll bring for longer periods of time two to three minutes compared with gongfu brewing which is a matter of twenty to thirty seconds but you are using a lot more tea leaf with gongfu brewing so my guess and it is only a guess is that a cup of gongfu brewed tea versus a cup a large cup of Western brew tea will have about the same amount of caffeine however with gongfu brewing you are drinking many more infusions so a session of gongfu will definitely give you more caffeine and that leads us onto our final mystery busters and that is that you can decaffeinate your tea if you give the tea leaves a longer tea wash in other words you put the loose leaf into hot water for 30 seconds and then you pour away that water this is not true studies have shown that if you do this a 30-second tea wash will extract and therefore you will throw away something like 10% of the caffeine content so will have an effect but not very much if you really wanted to go over 90% of the caffeine extraction to throw away you would have to be brewing for about 15 minutes so you can imagine how much of the flavor and the health-giving properties of the team you would be throwing away so if you were caffeine sensitive and you want to drink tea in the afternoon or late evening what do you do well the first thing is drink loosely second pick spring you spring pick tea made from tea leaves that are lower down on the tea plant and these tend to be long teeth if you want to follow the studies on roasting then maybe pick a roasted along you can also use cookie jar cookie jar is made from the stem of the plant and not the leaves they will also have lower caffeine and then it is a matter of controlling and experimenting reduce the amount of tea leaves that you use reduce the steeping time reduce the temperature slightly and do not through too many infusions don't go too far don't have too many infusions remember you can always keep the leads for the next days that when you wake up in the morning you can use those leads for your first cup of tea I did a video on how best to store your T in between infusions are put a link in the description below I hope that this video has given you all the information that you need to control your intake of caffeine therefore optimizing your sleep performance and your enjoyment of the tea that city has if you made at the end of this video then please give the video the thumbs up check out our YouTube playlist and let us know if there are any videos that you would like us to make if you're ever in London then come visit us in Camden say hi and taste our wares if you have any questions or comments then please fire them over other than that I'm John May in the beautiful island of koh samet thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea stay away from those tea bags keep drinking the good stuff and spread the word because nobody deserves bad tea bye
