Anachostic

Throughout this blog, there is mention of Nestea, a brand of iced tea with which I have a long history. For many years now, I’ve been satisfied with the imported Canadian Nestea from Amazon.  It ain’t cheap, but it’s the real deal.

Something else that I’ve recently kind of been obsessed with is seeing how long things last in my household.  Being a household of one and not really having the unfortunate financial burdens of the younger generations, I buy the largest size of things to get the most product per ounce or whatever unit of measure it is.  I figure, I’m going to use it all eventually and it’s not going to spoil, so if I buy something that will last a long long time, I just won’t have to go to the store as often.

So, I buy the 100ct of garbage bags, when I use one a week.  I buy 350 dryer sheets when I do load once a week.  I buy the bulk packs of soap and the largest shampoo I can find.  The funny thing about doing this is that buy the time I repurchase an items, the branding design has usually changed and shrinkflation has also usually  occurred.  I’ll write the date I started using the product on the package with a sharpie.  Just for note, I recetly found can get over 9 months out of the largest shampoo bottle.

But anyway, this is about tea.  I’m not going to bother researching how long a canister of tea lasts me, because there’s really only one size and it’s whatever.  It’s not something I’m going to shop for alternatives on.  But I am going to measure something else.  I do not make my tea to Nestea’s specifications.  I make my tea light.  And I mean really light.  Like tea flavored water.  So here’s the numbers after counting the number of servings I just made from my latest can.

A canister is reported to make 68 servings.  I counted 154.  I might have been able to scrape another out of it, but because of the constant absorption of moisture as the can is opened over and over, you have to use more mix at the end than at the beginning, and honestly, the quality isn’t as good.  So 154 is close enough for my needs.  So right off the bat, I’m getting double the servings, so I’m using half the recommended amount of mix.

But wait.  I said I like my tea light.  These servings on the can are 16oz glasses.  I drink my tea in a 32oz beer stein (my teacup).  So my servings are double the recommended as well.  So I’m using a quarter of the recommended amount of mix.  The hard math on this is: a canister will make 1,088oz of tea.  I made 4,928oz of tea.  I am using 22% of the recommended amount of mix.

Now, let’s look at the downsides to this.  Each serving of Nestea has 31g of sugar, which is 31% of your recommended daily intake (how convenient).  So you can drink like three glasses a day.  Yeah, yeah, I know that’s not how recommended intake works.  Just play along.  So each of my servings is 6.8% of the recommended daily amount and I can drink four of my servings to match one of Nestea’s servings. So I can have 12 a day.  How many do I drink?  Well, I don’t think it’s 12.  Could be more than 6, though.

And you probably think that’s bad, especially since I’m not in great health.  But I’ll tell you something.  When I worked in an office, I didn’t have Nestea there.  I had Coke.  And I drank lots of it.  Not as much as my tea, because Coke is very heavy and my tea is like water, but still, a lot.  And since I’ve been working at home for the last 3 years or so, my A1C has dropped significantly very likely due to this change in intake.  So, there, it’s not bad, relatively speaking.