Lab Analysis · Reading the Data Correctly

What Our Leaf Analysis Can—and Can’t—Tell You About a Brewed Cup

We have laboratory data on our processed young barley, wheat and oat leaves. That data is useful, but an important distinction was missing from the older version of this article: the BCIT work analyzed dried leaf material, not a standardized cup prepared the way a customer drinks it.

What was actually analyzed

Natural Farmworks submitted dried cereal-leaf samples for laboratory analysis. The testing identified and measured a range of naturally occurring compounds in those samples, including amino acids and other plant compounds, and compared material prepared under different processing conditions.

That tells us about the composition of the processed leaves we submitted.

A dried leaf result is not automatically a cup result

When you steep a whole-leaf infusion, water contacts the plant material and extracts some compounds more readily than others. Transfer can depend on water temperature, steep time, particle size, the compound itself and other preparation conditions.

What we can say confidently

• Our analyzed dried young cereal leaves contained measurable amino acids and other naturally occurring plant compounds.
• Different post-harvest processing conditions changed the measured composition of the dried leaves.
• Tea’d Greens is prepared by steeping the dried whole-leaf material in water and then removing the plant material.

What we cannot conclude from that analysis alone

• The exact amount of each compound in a normal brewed serving.
• How much of each compound is absorbed by a person drinking the infusion.
• That the beverage produces a specific health, sleep, mood, digestive or disease-related outcome.
• That the product is nutritionally equivalent to a serving of fresh vegetables.

Why this correction matters

Transparency is not only about publishing positive-sounding laboratory results. It also means describing the test correctly. The older version of this article blurred the difference between leaf composition and brewed-cup composition. We would rather make that distinction explicit.

What we may test next

A brewed-beverage study would answer a different set of questions: what transfers into the water under a defined preparation method, how repeatable those results are, and whether any measured amount is meaningful for nutrition labelling or product claims.

Until we have that type of data, we will keep the BCIT results in the category they belong in: characterization of our processed leaf material.