Why Did Victorians Think Green Tea Causes Hallucinations?

We attribute lots of potential health effects to green tea, but the Victorians had a strange one: they thought it caused hallucinations. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, chances are you've heard about some of
the potential health benefits of green tea and its extracts,
like antioxidants. Green tea comes from the leaves of the
Camellia synesis plants that have not undergone the same fermentation
and oxidation process used to make black tea. Green tea

(00:24):
has a higher concentration of antioxidants known as polyphenols than
other types of tea. But the pale brew hasn't always
been so hailed. Back in the Victorian era, it was
said to cause hallucinations. Rumors warned that sippers might see ghosts.
In the eighteen nineties, the land Set Medical Journal published
a study noting the negative effects of green tea, including

(00:46):
stomach problems and fluttering of the heart, citing a woman
profiled in Scottish Medical Journal who became hysterical after drinking
green tea on an empty stomach instant only physicians calmed
down by administering opium to further cement green tea's reputation.
Author Sheridan LeFanu, an Irish mystery writer whose eighteen seventy
two collection of Tales featured the aptly named Green Tea,

(01:10):
latched on to this idea and used it in the
short story that captured the public's imagination. Lefano's Green Tea
takes place in the early eighteen hundreds and recounts the
plight of one mister Jennings, a clergyman who sees the
evil spirit of a monkey and turns to his doctor
for help. His doctor rejects the idea that something supernatural
is happening, and after discovering that Jennings drinks green tea

(01:33):
before bed, the doctor claims the green tea is to blame.
The doctor contends that the green tea has built up
in Jennings body and is effecting his central nervous system,
causing him to hallucinate. While the story's scientific explanation that
green tea builds up in the body is false, it
didn't seem completely implausible. After all, Drinking too much of
some substances, like beer or other alcohol, can cause both

(01:56):
temporary and permanent issues with reality perception, and there's another
crucial kernel of truth. In the seventies, green tea was
an imported and expensive delicacy, so to increase its quantity
and its shelf life. Purveyors added a variety of other
things to the tea leaves, ranging from iron filings to
plants like hazelwood or hawthorne. They also supplemented green tea's

(02:19):
color by adding dye in the form of natural additives
like sheep dung and chemical colorance like Prussian blue. In fact,
green tea's identity and flavor had become so muddled and
diluted that when tea merchants attempted to sell pure green
tea free from fillers, people didn't believe it was actually
green tea and refused to buy it. Strange additives aside,

(02:41):
regular amounts of green tea do not cause hallucinations unless
you drink at an ordinate amount of it or anything
else that contains caffeine one two nine studies from Latrobe
University tested people drinking various doses of caffeine and measured
how much it would take to actually hallucinate. Participants who
drank nine cups of green tea or three cups of
coffee were three times more likely to hear voices and

(03:03):
see objects that were not there. So, while it's technically
possible to hallucinate by ingesting massive amounts of caffeine via
green tea. It would require a great deal of the
beverage and it wouldn't build up in one system to
have a cumulative effect either, So evil monkeys aside, Green
tea is good for you in moderation. Today's episode was

(03:28):
written by Laurie L. Dove and produced by Tyler Clang.
To learn more about the colorful history of green tea,
check out the episode of our compatriot podcast Stuff to
Blow Your Mind called the Myth of green Tea Hallucinations,
And of course, for more on this and lots of
other probably not hallucinatory topics, visit our home planet, how
stuff works dot com.