Cyanide tea

Okay, another pet peeve.

I've got some "green tea with lemon" here. Sure enough, the ingredients list shows nothing but green tea, natural flavouring and lemon peel.

1% of lemon peel. One. Lousy. Percent.

So how much is that really?

Let's find out.

There's 100 grams (e) of this tea mix in a box. Each box contains 50 teabags. That's 2 grams of tea per teabag. Out of those 2 grams, .02 grams is lemon peel.

Once my tea is prepared (for the sake of argument, I'll assume I'm using a cup/200 ml/200 grams of water, although it's probably a bit more) it will contain as much as 0.0001% of lemon peel (Oh, but of course... only if I chose to cut open the teabag).

Yup. One ten-thousandth of my cup of tea is actual lemon peel. Have a guess how much of the flavour of the tea comes from the "natural flavouring".

To put things into perspective, if I'm an average 80kg adult male, that's 250 micrograms of lemon peel per kg of body weight.

The fatal dose of cyanide for humans "can be as low as 1.5 mg per kg of body weight".

In other words, if tea packers accidentally reached for cyanide instead of lemon peel... you'd live.

Time for some exciting new tea flavours?