Fluoride: exposure limits, in tea, conspiracy

Thank you for that.
This is actually one of my interests and I'm glad to read the details.

So nice to hear a genuine thanks; thanks.

There are two different guides by the EPA that really do summarize the two levels of detail, one a short summary and one a very long review of all health related research on the subject, both mentioned in both posts (I think).

I kind of sympathize with people that see this as a genuine health issue, a risk, since it is an unusual case for US local governments deciding to add a supplement to drinking water.  There are real risks above a certain level of intake.  The scariest risks tend to stay a bit vague in research and references (the reduced IQ and pineal gland calcification), but based on another study of high intake groups in Tibet (where they drink that one brick tea high in fluoride) it affects their bones negatively.

It's not a cause for panic, as communicated by people like David Avacodo Wolf or that Food Babe blogger, and not a conspiracy.  Based only on drinking tea or on drinking treated water the risk seems low; someone doing both probably should consider it.

I also would like to thank you for this and your other, very occasional but usually well researched and informative posts. I also like tea (my favourite is Gaoshan Oolong from Taiwan, where you can smell the alpine meadows next to which it was grown), but don't have time to read your blog regularly. (And I also lived in Bangkok once upon a time.)

However, there is a typing error in your post:

bkk tea blog wrote:

-daily limit:  the standard recommended daily adult limit for intake is .8 mg / kg body weight / day, over the long term (an EPA value, adjusted down from a general limit of 10 mg / day observed earlier).  A 75 kg person, a good sized guy, would have a limit of 6 mg / day.

At 0.8 mg/kg, a 75kg person would have a daily limit of 60 mg. Could it be that you meant 0.08 kg/kg ?

That's it,  I was writing it from memory and slipped up by a digit.  Before I would check by moving the decimal for a 100 kg person but apparently I just wrote that out. 

Not to make it more complicated than it is but I've seen other recommended limits at .06-.07.  The research has been going on for awhile but they can't exactly split up sets of twins and have them dosed at different fluoride levels for 20 years and then test them.  They work from general studies and try to zero in on what thresholds are causing the side effects. That's no reason to be paranoid about it or take advice from the Food Babe but the specifics will keep shifting. Someday the whole water addition supplement may go away,  or they might disprove most of the risk, figuring out complex causation showing up as simple results.

A good catch Beppi.

You have a good eye for the sciences and numbers.

bkk tea blog wrote:

IFluoride intake does lower IQ, per two limited scope studies, but it's a stretch to think the US government wants people to be more stupid.  Then again that being real and effective would explain some things.

Tea and health aside, this is my favourite phrase in your whole message. Still makes me smile when I read it again and again!

Fluoride intake does lower IQ, per two limited scope studies, but it's a stretch to think the US government wants people to be more stupid.

Maybe. Have you seen what they have for politicians? You'd have to be pretty stupid to vote for any of them

Fred apparently didn't understand the subtleties of the passage I liked ...

beppi wrote:

Fred apparently didn't understand the subtleties of the passage I liked ...

Too many cups of tea.
Ner, just my own thoughts about politicians ... most politicians.

but it's a stretch to think the US government wants people to be more stupid.

I wonder how much tea their president drinks ?

Whatever went wrong with Trump it goes beyond tea.  He was ideal for a reality television series, and beyond cheating most of the people he did business with his business dealings worked out ok.  It's just a shame that half the US embraced his entry into politics.

Tea has been a political subject for many years, a lot of that coming from the massive sacks of cash made by British traders when they stole India.
However, much as Trump bashing is a common hobby, perhaps we could restrict ourselves from naming individual people as a bunfight is likely to break out.
As a note, I can't stand the sight of the bloke but that applies just as much to Clinton and the vast majority of the rest in pretty much every country.

I knew Trump would polarise opinion.
Maybe we could put this on hold .. please.

Fred wrote:

I knew Trump would polarise opinion.
Maybe we could put this on hold .. please.

It's just old-fashioned, face-saving, (sheathed) Sabre rattling. You can bank on that!

Fred wrote:

Tea has been a political subject for many years, a lot of that coming from the massive sacks of cash made by British traders when they stole India.

I am not sure if they stole India, but they certainly stole the lucrative world tea business, which previously was dominated by China. The British got hold of some tea plants and the recipe to ferment them into black tea from China, planted them in the only places within their empire with the right climate (the Darjeeling and Assam foothills of the Himalayas) and the rest is tea history.
By the way, same business model as natural (latex) rubber, where they stole rubber trees from quasi-monopolist (Portuguese) Brazil, planted them in Malaya (the Singapore Botanic Garden was founded for that purpose), let one of their chaps, called Dunlop, invent the inflatable tire and another, called Goodyear, the condom to create a market. Billions were subsequently made.

Tea history probably is a more civil tangent than politics. And it's an interesting story about the history  of tea in India.  Per my understanding,  which is well researched but by no means a final word, the British ddid manage to get a tea plant out  of China to grow in India. But they later found out that the variety of tea plants already there were better adapted  to the climate than the plant from China.  Most of the tea plants in China are camellia sinensis variety sinensis,  and "local" plants were variety Assamica, the same as  the type in Yunnan, China.

It's not simple to trace back history but the plants had most likely been brought from China around 1000 years before, or possibly earlier.  Tea history goes way back.  I could look up the related source to get  the timing right but a relatively recent archeological find pushed cultivated tea history back from an understood 3000 years to more like 5 or 6.  To date the time of cultivation they needed to find evidence that related to both the specific plant and human cultivation, specific arrangements of plant or ground elements along with human artifacts, so it took awhile for chance  to turn that up.

Black tea is a relatively modern development,  as far as we currently know (modern in the sense of on the order of 200 years old or less; I'm not good with retaining dates).  Powdered tea and compressed tea were earlier forms, followed by green tea, then in modern times oolong and black tea.  It really didn't help that the Chinese made an attempt to delete a lot of their history at one point but of course they weren't completely successful.

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The one and only tea I have ever liked is Chinese jasmine tea - seriously wonderful and great to sip with your sweet and sour chicken.
However, the British cup of char has a long and interesting history that has produced a whole cultural side avenue and even songs.

The culture of the English and their tea can be in part traced to Portugal.

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/2017082 … -obsession

Fred wrote:

The one and only tea I have ever liked is Chinese jasmine tea - seriously wonderful and great to sip with your sweet and sour chicken.

I prefer Indonesian (black-tea-based) jasmine tea (Teh Bunga Melati), which is available as a soft drink called Tehbotol everywhere in the country. I make it myself (with less sugar) by steeping two tea bags (Tong Tji brand is best) in a litre of lukewarm water overnight, then adding sugar to taste and chilling it. My wife has just been to Singapore and bought all stocks she could find there, which will last us a few months.
Chinese (green- or Oolong-tea-based) jasmine tea can be made the same way, but with even less (or no) sugar - and you need good quality, not the supermarket teabag variety. I have it sent by friends from Taiwan, just like better (Gaoshan) leaf tea varieties for the Guangfu preparation method (multiple, short steepings in tiny teapots).

I looked at a few articles on black tea history and they all say different things.  It's common to put the year of "invention" at 1590 and the first shipment to England at 1610, but per memory of other sources black tea wasn't making the trip that early, only green tea was.  This article is probably a good example of where I picked that idea up, with the oldest actual example of tea from Britain tested as green, from 1700, with a general reference on history in China after:

https://www.bostonteapartyship.com/tea- … in-britainhttps://sevencups.com/learn-about-tea/black-tea/

As they mention in that second article it would be hard to say when black tea was first made because there isn't that much to oxidizing the leaves; if bruised a bit they will oxidize, and even without that step white teas can oxidize.

On the subject of jasmine black teas, I did enjoy discovering those on a visit to Indonesia.  I mentioned the Tong Tji version in a post awhile back, and it was nice.  I've recently tried a much better version from Vietnam though, really on a completely different level, but it's not a commercial large-scale production tea, so sort of a different thing.  Compared to the nearly-free pricing in Indonesian grocery stores it's spendy but still not much as orthodox teas go (it cost about a dollar for 50 grams of the Tong Tji tea two years ago; Hatvala is selling theirs for $3.60 for the same amount).

Related to Indonesian commercial jasmine black tea a friend living there claimed he had a bad reaction to drinking it, although I forget what the symptoms were.  It was something that might not connect directly, as I recall (like a skin condition?), but he kept switching his diet and other factors and eventually got around to taking a break from jasmine black tea and whatever it was cleared up.  I'll ask him about it.  It seemed like it couldn't be the effect of jasmine but they may have been using a chemical to help with the release of flavor from flowers that didn't agree with him.

http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co … etnam.htmlhttp://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co … p-and.html

The Tong Tji tea in the bags has no obvious sign of jasmine flowers or particles thereof (which would be visible due to the colour), so I assume flavouring is added - and in Indonesia (well, Asia in general, with few exceptions) it's often better not to research further about the origin of that.
It tastes good, nevertheless!

That friend said it was from drinking Tong Tji jasmine black tea.  After he'd been drinking it every day for awhile he started getting cramps in his calves, leg cramps.  Of course he wouldn't connect that with a tea right away but as I said he kept changing up what might be causing it until he finally got around to taking a break from that tea, and the problem stopped.

I have no idea what the component would be causing that, or if it would be something universal versus just a reaction he had.  Different kinds of contaminants in different teas isn't unheard of, but just because it was a flavored tea I suspected something to do with the jasmine, maybe an agent used to help with infusion. 

I'm not really the paranoid type so if I had the tea around I still might drink it, even believing it could pose a minor health risk, I'd probably just not make a long term habit of drinking it.  I'm not saying what you should do, of course, just passing on where I see it.  Then again I've thrown tea out before for seeming odd; it would be a judgment call.  I did like that tea, and I've never experienced any reaction from any tea, they just don't always taste right.

I research teas quite a bit, and what I've seen related to teas possibly containing things that might be harmful does get a little strange at some points.  The real trick is that for something like an EU food import standard limits are really clear, but move that to baselines and limits related to other places and it's not really so clear how much of what is too much. 

I guess this fluoride issue ties in with that; awhile back 10 mg / day worked as a rough limit, now a current version of .08 mg / kg body weight / day might cut that back, and I've seen .06 to .07 instead, around half (depending on weight).  It might drop from there, after a few more studies weigh in, and eventually it might not be added to water at all.  Lots of other things aren't as clear as they might be, the influence of aluminum or lead, for example.  The former is hazy as could be but how much is too much for lead may not be easy to pin down, and "none" isn't really going to work; it's around.  It seems better to me to not be too paranoid about it but a little careful.  And at some point to not focus on it, really, since checking test results and studies all the time would drive someone crazy.

Hey John, since we're on the topic of tea here (but not fluoride - I'm going slightly off-topic):
You're living in Thailand, so you probably know the "Thai Ice Tea", a black-tea-based concoction infused with thick condensed milk and heaps of sugar, stronger than Kratingdaeng (the original "Red Bull"), right?
I always wondered about its nutty taste, which cannot come from milk or sugar. Is the tea flavoured in any way, and with what?
I once persuaded a street drinks seller to sell me a pack of the leaves, but could not find anything unusual (other than very low quality tea). What does make it nutty?

Good question.  To me that typical taste as one generally encounters it relates to a mix of spices and star anise, with the latter standing out to me for being pronounced and specific.  I researched the original version (before that type became a powdered, artificially flavored and colored drink) and it may have been roasted crushed tamarind seeds and orange blossoms providing the flavor in the past.  I can't say for sure if it tasted similar to the modern version or not.

There are loose tea versions out there now, as you mentioned, it's just easier to find the powdered tea versions.  Some of both would be artificially flavored, and it's hard to say what that would relate to.  I researched an online recipe version and experimented with making it once myself, described in the following post, with one online recipe version using star anise, clove, and cardamom to achieve that spiced flavor profile:  http://teaintheancientworld.blogspot.co … ratch.html

I don't really think it's the spices you mention. Those are frequently added to tea in India (Masala Chai, with cow's milk) and the Middle East (without milk) and taste differently. So the nutty taste remains a mystery ...

Masala chai is typically cinnamon, ginger, cardamom, and clove, with star anise and black pepper a bit more optional.  The set does overlap but it's not the same.  Here in Thailand Thai tea is typically a powdered, artificially flavored and colored drink, so it's hard to get a feel for what "real" or artificial flavor ingredients are contributing what. 

The versions I've tried seem to mostly taste like star anise to me, and not really much like nuts.  A bit like chemicals too, like a flavored coffee or slurpee.  I've had a few versions based on loose tea instead of powder but they all seem to be in the same general range.  I agree there is some degree of mystery to what is in them, and they're typically not just those few spices mentioned in that one do it yourself version.