Drinking Too Much Black Iced Tea Caused Kidney Problems
A 56-year-old Arkansas man, went to the hospital last May with nausea, weakness, fatigue and body aches. Doctors determined his kidneys were badly clogged and inflamed by the food chemical called oxalate.
The doctor found out that the man had been drinking about 16 8-ounce cups of iced tea every day. Oxalate is found in black tea, a chemical known to cause kidney stones or even kidney failure in excessive amounts. Besides black tea, oxalate is found in spinach, rhubarb, nuts, wheat bran and chocolate.
In rare cases, too much oxalate can lead to kidney trouble, but often there’s also a contributing intestinal problem. That didn’t seem to be the case for the Arkansas man, and he had no family or personal history of kidney disease.
At 16 cups of iced black tea each day, he was taking in three to 10 times more oxalate than the average American, Ghaffar and her colleagues reported.
Federal studies suggest that, on average, U.S. adults drink a total of 10 or 11 cups of beverages per day — that’s water, coffee and all other liquids combined.
Dr. Umbar Ghaffar of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock and two other doctors describe the case in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.