Tea is made from plants. All plants have proteins. The parts of the plant that we eat may or may not be a good source of protein for humans.
Practically all Chinese, Indian, and English teas are all made from the same species of plant, Camellia sinensis, simply known as a tea tree. If you were to eat the leaves they would be a good source of protein and fiber, not to mention vitamins and antioxidants. However, we discard the leaves with the fiber, and typical ways of preparing the leaves and the tea can decrease the protein and antioxidants.
Its possible your brand flash freezes tthe leaves or uses some other method to try and preserve these nutrients.
Ive seen some English teas that are powder you mix in instead of steeping, and this would work as well. In fact, tea leaves are absolutely edible! If you get a decent to high quality tea you can take your leaves after you make tea and throw them in a smoothie, soup, or even eggs and youll get the rest of the nutrients left in them and wont be thowing food in the bin.
On that same pedantic note: they're not minimums, they're testable limits. Testable. As in, not every batch is, nor every thousand...
Also, somebody here's gonna love finding out how much of their own body mass is bacteria, parasites, and just plain dead. Not to mention that everything pasteurized still has the corpses of the "cleaned" microbes floating in it.
I used to work with health inspectors, when talking about my work I would describe what they do as ā You know the guys who go into restaurants and say āIām shutting you down thereāre too many cockroaches in the soupāā
About 1 person in 10 notices I said too many cockroaches.
Restaurants are allowed to have a certain amount of bug parts in soup.