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Comment by fredley | Hacker News Reader

There is no 'dosage', because—as mentioned in the article—these capsules are classified as food, not medicine:

> What is it about green tea supplements that might cause harm at certain doses to some people? Scientists do not know for certain. Because green tea has been drunk for thousands of years, supplements consisting of its concentrated form are regulated in the US and Europe as foods, not medicines. That means that specific safety testing has not been required, so the scientific picture of how green tea supplements might affect our health is incomplete.

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Same with water, table salt (NaCl), coffee, pomegranate juice and many other things.

Dose makes the poison, some people are capable of handling more, and some less.

Tea, among other things, has caffeine in it, and enough caffeine will kill you, but other than in pill form, you’ll likely not manage to get to the threshold because you’ll start vomiting way earlier.

It’s possible that there are other compounds harmful at high concentration. And of course, it’s not unthinkable that some of his pills were contaminated with something more dangerous.

But the dosage alone in some cases may explain enough of the damage.

Average caffeine pill is 100mg (roughly on par with a cup of tea or coffee). Caff can be fatal for adults at about 10g of consumption (Heckman 2010) - about 100 caffeine pills.

Caffeine toxicity can happen much earlier, but it's mostly concerning in combination with other substances. Caff on its own ... it's really, really hard to get to a dangerous dose inadvertently.

If the substance is pure, and the dosage is correctly labeled. Neither of which is especially common for nutritional supplements.

The key to this article is the line, "catechin doses at or above 800mg may pose health concerns." Pop over to amazon and look at one of the top results for green tea extract: https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Green-Tea-Extract-Capsules/dp/B00... A single pill is 160mg.

They might classify them as food but they’re not Whole Food. There’s a large difference between eating a whole food and taking out a single molecule from something and wrapping it in a bunch of filler material. The pills they showed looked like powdered tea, but I’d bet he was taking something much more concentrated.

If there is a relative chance of danger - they should include a warning ! My dishsoap has a warning

There is no official "recommended" dosage and often the "maximum" dosage is just a guess too. Not the same as not being able to determine the dosage in each capsule or pill.

That doesn't mean there is no dosing suggestion on the packet.

Supplements are effectively unregulated in the US if Last Week Tonight is correct.

https://youtu.be/WA0wKeokWUU

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