Enjoying a glass of tea, be it sweetened, iced or black can be both a pleasant and healthy activity, but as with most things, doing it excessively can lead to serious health problems.
A 56 year old man from Arkansas was rushed to the hospital with a severe case of kidney failure because he drank too much tea on a daily basis.
The man is now on dialysis and doctors say that he may be on it for the rest of his life. He checked himself into the hospital for kidney trouble in may and doctors have figured out what caused it.
According to the doctors in charge of the patient, this is a very unusual case because the man drank a gallon of tea everyday. This habit, which is usually associated with habits like alcoholism or drug abuse, left the man with serious medical problems. The man liked to drink a very large amount of Lipton tea daily, the doctors claimed.
The unusual case was detailed in the New England Journal of Medicine. The doctors who wrote the article talk about the link between consuming too much ice tea and the medical condition the man is now facing.
Dr. Umbar Ghaffar, from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and one of the lead authors of the article, explained that overdrinking ice tea was the only plausible explanation for the man’s kidney failure.
The article does not say whether the man used to drink his tea with or without sugar.
However, the study talks about oxalate, which is a food chemical found mostly in black tea, chocolate, spinach and nuts. Although oxalate is not usually dangerous for human health, it has been known to cause kidney problems for some.
According to the doctors, the man from Arkansas was one of those cases who were affected by too much oxalate. The doctors say that the man used to drink 16 cups of iced black tea on a daily basis, which means that he was actually consuming 10 times more oxalate than he should have, said Ghaffar and her colleagues.
Dr. Randy Luciano, a kidney expert from the Yale School of Medicine, said that this case should not worry people who drink tea.
Dr. Luciano assures that this is an unusual case and it happened only because the Arkansas man drank too much tea every day.
Image Source: bonappetit
