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Massive tea consumption linked to kidney failure
Drink Ice Tea? Might want to reconsider.
Why?
Some guy in the US developed symptoms of weakness, fatigue and body aches, and his doctor recommended cutting his massive ice tea consumption.
It’s being called ice tea nephropathy.
What’s the issue? It has a large amount of oxalate (which many foods has).
This guy drank a lot of iced tea: around 16 nine-ounce glasses a day. That brought 1,500 mgs of oxalate into his body.
The doctors say the max for daily consumption should be around 40-50 mgs.
“If you drink tea once or twice a day, it probably wouldn’t exceed what is the normal range for Americans. But this patient was taking 10 times that amount,” said Dr. Umbar Ghaffa of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
“But in this case there were oxalate crystals inside the kidney, and that generates an inflammatory reaction,” Ghaffar told Reuters Health. “If that’s not resolved it will cause scarring and loss of the kidney tissue. So that’s what probably was happening in this patient.”
Consuming too much oxalate can lead to forming kidney stones. This is why Advanced Urology recommend that you exercise regularly and drink plenty of water to keep your bladder healthy.
However tea in smaller amounts does the opposite.
“[P]eople who take tea in the usual amounts actually have a lower risk of kidney stones,” Curhan said.
