When a man went to hospital complaining of nausea, weakness, fatigue and body aches, doctors discovered he had kidney failure – caused by drinking too much iced tea.
The unidentified 56-year-old man, from Arkansas, was found to have badly clogged and inflamed kidneys as a result of ingesting too much of a chemical called oxalate, which is found in spinach and rhubarb, among other foods.
But it wasn’t from eating too much spinach that the man’s kidneys had failed, and he had no family or personal history of kidney disease. It was from his unusual habit of drinking up to a gallon of iced tea each day.
“It was the only reasonable explanation,” said Dr. Umbar Ghaffar of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
Ghaffar and her colleagues reported, the man was drinking up to 16 cups of oxalate-rich iced black tea every day, which means his oxalate consumption was sometimes 10 times that of the average American. Black tea has a chemical known to cause kidney stones or even kidney failure in excessive amounts.
“The man is on dialysis, perhaps for the rest of his life,” added Ghaffar.
Meanwhile, the Arkansas case appears to be very extreme, according to Dr. Randy Luciano, a Yale School of Medicine kidney specialist who has treated people with kidney damage from too much oxalate.
“I wouldn’t tell people to stop drinking tea,” said Luciano, who was not involved in the research. What the man drank “is a lot of tea.”
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[Sources: CBSNews, Metro]
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