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chinese tea toxicity

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Feb 20th, 2017
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  1. http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/publications/reports/food-agriculture/2012/pesticides-chinese-tea-report/
  2. according to that report they bought some green, oolong and jasmine tea from chinese big name tea companies (tenfu for example), some very cheap (€15/kg) and some fairly expensive (€280/kg), and found that each of these contained some pesticides, the "worst" of which (the banned, illegal ones) were:
  3. >methomyl, illegal over a certain amount pretty much everywhere, too high intake brings kidneys problems, no signs of it being a carcinogenic or neurotoxin were found
  4. >endosulfan, illegal in a lot of countries and soon to become illegal in most others, it's a neurotoxin that inhibites neurotransmitter receptors and the max safe dose for adults is 0.006mg per kg of your body per day, so you can be safe with an intake of 0.042mg per day if you weight 70kg; according to the table in the greenpeace paper, the tea with the higher endosulfan concentration had 0.35mg of it per kg of tea leaves, which means you'd be fine if for everyday of your life you consumed a bit more than half a kg of the most toxic tea they tested; this as well has not found to be carcinogenic, and while it has been connected to development disorders and birth defects, the doses were higher than the ones I mentioned above
  5. >fenvalerate, which according to greenpeace and other very inaccurate (as in, they state it's toxic but don't provide any data about dosage or real studies) sources, it's moderately toxic in mammals because it temporarily inhibits the sodium permeability of cells in the brain, which makes the brain work worse than it should, causing coughs, headaches, nausea and similar stuff that goes away after little time (hours); the epa has removed this from their archive, I'm guessing because it wasn't considered toxic enough to be worthwhile of the space
  6.  
  7. sources
  8. >https://archive.epa.gov/pesticides/reregistration/web/pdf/0028fact.pdf
  9. >https://archive.epa.gov/pesticides/reregistration/web/pdf/endosulfan_red.pdf
  10. >http://www.toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Fenvalerate
  11. >wikipedia.org, pages relative to each of the chemical in question
  12.  
  13. please note that the greenpeace report tries to make it seem like the quantities of chemicals in tea are toxic, and my guess is that, being greenpeace an "environmentalist" organization, they want to protect the flora and fauna as much as possible, and those three chemicals are moderately to severely more toxic to some animals that to humans, and it's mentioned that a big part of the concern is due to the fact that these substances have been linked to problems of some kind in pregnant women and consequent children, so if you want to be paranoid you can surely avoid making your pregnant gf drink a lot of chinese tea
  14. I only looked into those three chemicals because they were made to seem the most dangerous and while I don't know if they actually are, I hope my brief research makes you take the info in that green-tea-guide.com article with a grain of salt
  15. if you fear for your safety, I invite you to read more about the other chemicals found in chink tea that the greenpeace paper mentions, I'm very convinced you'll find they're not nearly enough toxic to cause any observable effect when the tea is consumed in reasonable doses
  16.  
  17. TL;DR
  18. there's a quantity of toxic substances in chinese tea, who knows if it's more or less than in tea from sri-lanka or india, nobody seem to care much about those to verify, but the amount of those substances isn't nearly high enough to cause any harm to a human being if drank in reasonable quantities (where unreasonable quantities would be the liquor of 0.5kg of leaves of the cheapest and most toxic tea you can buy from china), so unless you drink 15 liters of tea per day you'll be fine.
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