The Best Decaffeinated Iced Teas
by Shereen Jegtvig for foodessentials
Iced tea makes a terrific warm-weather beverage, but if you’re sensitive to caffeine, you may not want the extra jitters that come with it. There are many decaffeinated iced tea products that will quench your thirst without the caffeine. But what other things do they contain? Many mixes and ready-made iced tea drinks contain artificial sweeteners and artificial colors that may be a problem for people who are sensitive to them. They may also contain large amounts of sugar, which adds to your daily calorie count. While one sugary iced tea may not be bad, two or three will add too many calories. What’s best is tea without any artificial or added anything.
You can read the labels when you shop for decaffeinated iced tea and be sure to look at the ingredients list. Or you can use the Foodessentials database to do a little research by searching for decaffeinated iced tea.
I’ve used the Foodessentials widget to compare decaffeinated iced teas to look for types of sweeteners used, preservatives, and colors. I’ll start by looking at decaffeinated iced teas by their sugar content per 100 grams of tea.
You can see there are many varieties that have no sugar and two that contain a large amount of sugar per 100 grams of tea.
Sweeteners:
Since so many of these beverages contain zero calories, you can guess that most are sweetened with artificial sweeteners, and in fact eight of them contain some combination of aspartame, acesulfame-K or sucralose.
The Lipton Lemon Sugar Sweetened Decaffeinated and 4C Decaffeinated Natural Lemon brands do not contain artificial sweeteners or high fructose corn syrup. However, you can look at the ingredients lists for both brands to see they contain sugar. The Lipton Iced Tea Brew Decaffeinated and the Tetley brand of decaffeinated iced tea contain no sweeteners.
Preservatives:
Next, let’s use the FoodEssentials widget to look at which teas are preservative free:
You can click on the brands in the list and find that citric acid or ascorbic acid (vitamin C)are the usual preservatives. The Lipton Iced Tea Brew Decaffeinated and the Tetley Iced Tea Blend Decaffeinated Family Size Round Bags that are sugar and sweetener-free are also preservative-free.
Colors:
You’ll see a trend here, since the same two brands show up as color-free.
The rest of the teas contain a variety of colors, many of which are artificial. A closer investigation shows that Turkey Hill uses only caramel coloring, but the other brands use various artificial colorings.
And the Best Are…
The Lipton Iced Tea Brew Decaffeinated and the Tetley Iced Tea Blend Decaffeinated Family Size Round Bags are the winners because they only contain tealeaves – no sugars, preservatives, or artificial anything. This suits the whole family, because each person can add lemon and their choice of sweetener if they want, or just leave the tea plain – very refreshing.
Learn More About Other Types of Tea
Use our FoodEssentials database to explore other types of tea:
Shereen Jegtvig has a masters degree in human nutrition and 16 years clinical experience in nutritional counseling. She writes about nutrition for About.com and TypeAMom.net. She is also the co-author of the upcoming book, Superfoods For Dummies.
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