To put it simply, you're never going to be able to count your caffeine consumption as accurately as you'll be able to calculate the total carbohydrates you eat. But that shouldn't deter you from taking an educated guess about which foods contain caffeine and which ones don't, to have a solid estimate of what we're looking at with these number guidelines. Caffeine numbers: What they mean for you.
How much caffeine is really in Green Tea?
Estimates from the FDA show that the average 8oz cup of green tea contains about 30- 50 mg. Other sources vary but most commonly place it somewhere around 35- 40 mg. By comparison, an 8oz cup of brewed coffee typically comes with 80- 100 mg of caffeine per cup.
But remember: the spectrum isn't that clear-cut, so you want to take into account various factors when deciding on the right amount of caffeine to brew into your mug. Also, important, steeping time varies, and how long you let your tea steep - a two- or three-minute brew doesn't contain quite as much caffeine as steeping your tea for five minutes and above. As with caffeine, water temp also factors in - hotter temps can pull a larger amount of caffeine from your leaves, which is also why green tea is generally brewed at cooler temps than, say, black tea. Some varieties of green tea also contain differing levels of caffeine - with matcha, you'll get a little more buzz than usual, since you're actually consuming the powdered leaves in addition to your brewed tea. In addition, the age of the leaves and the harvesting methods will slightly impact the statistics, which is another reason as to why the numbers vary at times from source to source, rather than being a fixed number.
To start, the most common analysis on commercial teas that was peer-reviewed took the caffeine levels in a selection of white teas, green teas, and black teas, all the way from the initial testing to around 14 to 61 mg of caffeine for the most common variety, depending on whether or not they brewed them. On a list, we ran some herbs directly on the herbal teas themselves to see what levels of caffeine came back. Fortunately, in this data set, there was no evidence of any caffeine- no caffeine!
Why Herbal Tea Is Not Coffee (and vice versa)
The real reason for this difference isn't boiling the leaves but the leaves themselves. Traditional teas, also known as green, oolong, and black teas, originate from the same plant, Camellia sinensis - which means the plants they stem from all produce caffeine. Herbal teas, on the other hand, originate from a range of plants-such as lemon, mint, olive leaves, holy basil, or chamomile plants - none of which produce any caffeine.
That is why herbal tea's benefit is not simply an assumed and predictable lower dose of caffeine, as the case might be if the green tea was gentler in its own kind. The aforementioned peer-reviewed study bears out that claim directly. Green tea all contained caffeine, whereas the herbal tea samples did not, regardless of the amount of time steeped.
It's worth remembering this difference if what you're targeting here is "less caffeine," not a lack of caffeine in total. Lighter brewed tea (short immersion and low temp - like for a green) could probably land you somewhere between 15-25 milligrams in all-terrain. But if your goal is avoiding caffeine altogether, herbal tea is the more dependable choice, since there's no steeping method or brewing adjustment that introduces caffeine into a plant that never had any to begin with.
Something else that's important to remember is that simply because something is called "herbal tea" doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to be completely caffeine-free. Certain premixes on store shelves are a "little" bit of actual green tea leaf or black tea leaves mixed in. They say they're a blend of herbs - they are - but because they do have a small quantity of leaf, there is definitely caffeine in it. You can always read the box and see if tea leaves - green, black, white - are somewhere in the ingredients to know if it's not truly caffeine-free.
When we break down what goes into it and use what's at our own consumption level, then we can build a better daily plan around not over-doing caffeine on our behalf, be it green tea, staying within the guidelines and then moving on with it; perhaps even jumping for mint tea, olive leaf tea, lemongrass or tulsi; knowing what's where becomes that much more definitive to build the daily regimen from. If you're moving to the no-caffeine route, consider starting with our herbal range of teas.
