Charles Thomas Draper

keep drinking more tea. :)

LOL

I read that pu-erh tea has the most flouride and the Tibetans are prone to flouride poisoning from drinking so much of it. that has made me think a bit.

Maybe that’s why they put the rancid yak butter and salt in it….

lol!

I try to keep some perspective on stories like that. You also hear about the rampant, chronic GI problems in Japan because no one get’s any fiber because all they eat is short grain, white rice. But does that mean we should avoid rice, or have less if we eat it “a lot”? Nah. There’s an important difference between “a lot” and “exclusively”. Rural Tibetans are drinking (I suspect anyway) “exclusively” these high fluoride teas. I may drink “a lot” at least compared to Western people, even Western tea drinkers, but there’s a big gap between that and the only beverage you consume all day every day being a source of this problem.

I went through a similar concern for a while with lapsang souchong. They are smoked, traditionally, using pine wood. Even hardwoods can create a lot of carcinogens when they are smoked for things like slow cooking meat, but there’s a reason no one uses soft woods like pine for this purpose. Pine smoke is pretyt much all poison. So, do I really want to be drinking that?

I eventually decided it was wise to take my beloved Black Dragon out of my daily tea pot (I was blending Yunnan gold, wang pu-erh and Black Dragon as a daily pot at work for a long time) but that there’s no reason to avoid it completely.

So yes, if you’re drinking sheng every day, you may want to do research into the potential issues with the specific leaves you have (tea isn’t as consistent across a category as we’d like to think), but I wouldn’t stop drinking it entirely or anything.

Jim your reviews and comments are always thought provoking.

I don’t think anyone should avoid it, just might not be a great idea to drink it all day long every day.

I suspect that would poison the wallet long before the body.

I couldn’t drink any tea all day, every day, because I like to drink differeny\t teas every day usually. It makes tea drinking more interesting for me.