Quote:
Originally Posted by snowy
Regular green tea does contain caffeine, you know, so I hope you meant decaf.
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They say the caffeine in green tea doesn't have the same effect on you because of the counteraction of theanine. This is why you can drink green tea all day and not feel the same way if you were drinking coffee. Green tea has an odd sort of "calm stimulation" because of this. Think of it as the effect meditation/breathing or exercise has on you. It reduces your stress and can refresh you at the same time.
The other thing too is that green tea (sencha especially, by my own practice) can be double brewed. The second brewing will have many of the good compounds still but nearly none of the caffeine will be left. So if you double brew your green tea all day, you only get (about) half the overall caffeine. For example, 10 cups of double brewed green tea is like drinking 5 or 6 cups of single brewed green tea. At about 20 to 40 mg or so of caffeine per cup, we're talking about 100 to 200 mg vs. 200 to 400 mg in a day.
It's interesting to note how much different that is compared to coffee consumption. Most cups of coffee have over 100 mg of caffeine (and we're talking
cups cups; many people drink grandes* and mugs of it). So this means that a couple of cups of coffee will blow past up to ten cups of green tea, depending on how you brew it. And this isn't even accounting for the counteraction of theanine I mentioned.
This is why I want to switch.
*According to the Starbucks website, the "Bold Pick of the Day" has 260 mg of caffeine in a tall and 330 mg of caffeine in a grande. So even if you fully single brewed your green tea and drank 10 cups of it, you'd still be fairly equal to a single coffee from Starbucks.