Hello, I've been reading about fluorine content in green tea and am somewhat concerned about it. Well, I work in a scientific environment where we have wet chemistry equipment, namely an ion detector. So, I had the chemist responsible run a sample of some green tea I brewed. 1 teaspoon of sencha for 2 minutes in 6 oz of 160 degree water. The results were very surprising, the tap water I made the tea with had approx 1.1 ppm, while the green tea had 7.6 ppm. Considering the fact that I habitually drink tea at work I'm worried about fluorosis and other fluorine related diseases. Can anyone direct me to a high quality tea that has very low fluorine content? ( Prefer vegetal tasting tea, like sencha and pi lo chun)
Have you ever worried about how much fluorine is in ALL the vegetation you eat?....possibly because it is irrigated with fluoridated municipal water. Are you exhibiting any symptoms of fluorosis? Why are you worrying so much, there are MUCH greater environmental risks that we are exposed to daily.....carbon monoxide, exhaust, detergents, lead, tobacco smoke, car accidents, dog maulings.....etc. You are probably more at risk of maiming yourself with the boiling water from your tea kettle than from over-fluoridating yourself. I mean, exactly how many gallons of the stuff are you drinking daily?
We run a much higher risk of flurosis I think just brushing our teeth and rinsing our mouth with toothpastes and mouthwashes that are enhanced with fluoride. I am not surprised at the fluoride levels in tea but would suggest that perhaps you should trying boiling your water and test the boiled water first before presuming that it is the tea that has elevated the fluoride level. I ask this out of scientific curiosity because I am wondering if boiling the water might not release and make more available the fluoride within the tap water? I know that many minerals which are inactive in normal tap water are released during the boiling process so I wonder if this might not hold true for fluoride as well? I am not a scientist so I really don't have this answer but certainly would like to know the answer?!
As for elevated levels of fluoride in tea...Well most research I have read surrounding tea always seems to be positive. But as with everything in our modern world, I am certain that man made contaminents are in our tea and in our food chain generally.
Not being a smart ass, but that was just plain funny. Especially the dog maulings and tea kettle maiming bits, nice work :)
Seriously though the asians have been drinking tea forever, and some very high amounts daily and they tend to live forever. I would venture to say if you ran a lot of stuff you eat or drink through a battery of scientific tests you would be eating live free-range cattle and chickens and whole grains uncooked for the most part. As with anything in life, moderation is always #1. Maybe have 6 12oz cups of tea and 6
12oz. cups of water instead? That would be a much better idea anyhow and much better for you. It's like protein starvation, if you are stranded in the woods and catch and eat only rabbits you will die of starvation. Because of how lean rabbits are and your body gets no fat and things like your brain, eyes, etc. need fat. It is all relative.
- Dominic Drinking: Nothing Still, need to stop posting and brew a cup.
Make no mistake - someday you will die. To offset the flouride make sure your dietary intake of iodine is sufficient as each more reactive halogen displaces the ones with less activity. Old time practitioners used Lugols solution a drop in a glass of water as an iodine source.
The test that I had run did not consider bioavailability of the fluorine. I was checking for how much fluorine was in the water. If anything an increase in fluorine would be due to some of the water evaporating off. But as you can tell from the levels, I would have had to start with almost 42 ounces of water and boil it down to the 6 i used to come up with that fluorine count.
So the fluorine levels are elevated by the tea. For my own curiosity I'd appreciate when you have time running these tests on other teas as well. But having said that, as Dominic points out in his post, those of us having drank large quanities of tea all our lives have seen no signs of fluorosis. And as for me I've been drinking tea since I was a tot and in more than 35 years of drinking pints and sometime gallons of tea per day I've had nothing but benefit from tea. My blood pressure is
110/80 my cholesterol is under 150 and my blood sugars are under 90 which is great for someone over 40, overweight and still eating pork belly and far more fat than I should!LOL
As for finding a green tea with lower levels of fluorine or any other "harmful" elements I would say that's tough at best. This is due mainly to the conditions of the crop varying from year to year. What you buy today as "low" level fluorine tea might have even high levels next year.
I frankly wouldn't worry about. Flouride isn't going to hurt you, if anything it will save your teeth. Unless you haven't developed your adult teeth yet, fluoride isn't going to effect you in a negative way. Honestly, as I young child I ate toothpaste on several occasions, and I live in a place where we naturally have a lot of fluoride and minerals from our spring water (Colorado Springs) and it resulted in me having some permanent brown stains on my teeth. On the positive side, the fluoride which caused the staining also means that it's almost impossible for me to ever develop a cavity. The only threat posed to your teeth by tea is a stain similar to that experienced by coffee drinkers. Simply brush often and perhaps consider a whitening toothpaste (or professional whitening if you need it) There was also a study done on Bartlett, Texas where the water natural contains 8 ppm of fluoride, and no negative effects were found over the ten year period of the study. The average amount of years that the participants had been exposed to these amounts of fluoride was more than 30.
I frankly wouldn't worry about it. Flouride isn't going to hurt you, if anything it will save your teeth. Unless you haven't developed your adult teeth yet, fluoride isn't going to effect you in a negative way. Honestly, as I young child I ate toothpaste on several occasions, and I live in a place where we naturally have a lot of fluoride and minerals from our spring water (Colorado Springs) and it resulted in me having some permanent brown stains on my teeth. On the positive side, the fluoride which caused the staining also means that it's almost impossible for me to ever develop a cavity. The only threat posed to your teeth by tea is a stain similar to that experienced by coffee drinkers. Simply brush often and perhaps consider a whitening toothpaste (or professional whitening if you need it) There was also a study done on Bartlett, Texas where the water natural contains 8 ppm of fluoride, and no negative effects were found over the ten year period of the study. The average amount of years that the participants had been exposed to these amounts of fluoride was more than 30.
I also read somewhere that the calcium in milk/cream binds the flouride in tea, thus rendering it non bioavailable and harmless.
There are other benefits as well. A Canadian science team recently theorized that the reason the Intuit don't get mercury poisoning from the fish diet is the tea they drink, thinking that tea binds out the mercury or somehow keeps it from being absorbed.
So, I drink lots of tea and don't worry about that.
I wouldn't worry about it, unless you have other flouride exposure from outside. After all, it's only seven times higher than the water, and you are surely drinking more than seven times as much water than tea.
If you are really concerned about fluorine, you should know that the fluorine in tea comes from the soil that it's grown in. So if you try a Japanese tea and get a large number on the assay, then try a Taiwanese green and a Yunnan green, and see how different things are from different locations. I bet you could get a small paper out of it, even.
You don't even really need the ion detector; Chamot and Mason has an easy kitchen-table titration for fluorine that used to be common in photo labs back when photo labs actually could afford to care.
AFAIK "fluorosis" is the staining of teeth that happens in people when they consume too much fluoride as children while their teeth are being formed. AFAIK once your adult teeth are in there's no way you can get "fluorosis."
The only other "diseases" one could get from fluoride would be a rather quick death if one ingested way WAY too much of the stuff. Aspirin is far more dangerous than fluoride.
I can't really afford to order all those online research papers, but there is one research paper out there that compared pu-erh tea to tibetan brick, and found that pu-erh had lower flouride. Tibetan brick that they used in the study was from a lower grade of leaf, from larger leaves, stems, etc.. pu-erhs were from smaller leaves. I don't recall what the flouride content was exactly, but I remember estimating that the flouride content of the tea brewed from their pu-erh samples would be less than flouridated water if you used unflouridated spring water or some kind of flouride-free filtered water to make the tea.
It would be interesting to get more info and do more studies - apparently this is a problem with tea now just recently because of world pollution problems. And excess flouride causes, if I understand this correctly, bone spurs in adults - a worst case scenario could be in your backbone and places like that where you'd end up bent over 24/7 or in tremendous pain having a spur poking you somewhere in your spine or whatever. Not something you want. I am concerned about this, actually.
My strategy is to go for the "buds" or the smallest leaves - organic perhaps? Buy whole-leaf tea or buds like silver needle, etc.. There are also some of the higher-quality teas that are grown way up in the mountains that get fresh rain up there, I thought that maybe those might be better.
It's that the tea plant is really good at absorbing any environmental pollutants it encounters, and the larger the leaves are, the more time they have had to grow, the more flouride they will have accumulated. The buds are fresh new growth, and will have accumulated less than the big leaves that have been around a while. It's probably also important to look for organic or higher-quality teas that have been grown in healthier environments.
I try to get buds and small leaves, from high-quality suppliers. I also drink a lot of puerh, and the one study on puerh looked promising - although I wouldn't be suprised if they used puerh made from "improved" broad-leaf varieties as opposed to those "ancient arbor" or "wild" pu-erh trees. It's kind of a drag, because some of the best pu-erh to age is the stuff that's with the largest leaves. The cause is our modern polluted world (people 100's or 1000's of years ago didn't have this problem).
So for all my worrying and non-scientific googling I have discovered that it basically boils down to -- 1) how polluted the place is where it's grown, and 2) how big the leaves are, whether or not it's new growth like buds and new little leaves or bigger leaves from the bottom of the bush or whatever.
It's not a matter of pollution. Fluorides appear naturally in the soil, just like calcium compounds. If there's a lot of fluoride in the soil, plants grown in that place will tend to have floride compounds.
Plus, different species of plants have different affinities for various ions/elements in the soil. All tea plants, e.g., take up lots of aluminum, and it does come into the cup.
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