If you like iced tea, make sure you don't drink too much. Doctors linked an Arkansas man's kidney failure to his unusual habit of drinking 16 eight-ounce glasses of iced tea each day.
After searching for other likely causes, they finally stumbled upon a reasonable cause for the 56-year-old man's kidney troubles. When he told doctors that he had the habit of drinking a gallon of iced tea a day, they put two and two together. Since black tea has a chemical known to cause kidney stones and kidney failure in exorbitant amounts, they concluded that his habit was the unlikely cause of this health problems.
"It was the only reasonable explanation," said Dr. Umbar Ghaffar of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. She and two other doctors detail the case in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
The man was taken to the hospital last May with weakness, nausea, body aches and fatigue. Doctors came to the conclusion that his kidneys were badly clogged and inflamed by the food chemical called oxalate. In a report by the Associated Press, Ghaffar said that the man is on dialysis perhaps for the rest of his life.
The case is unprecedented since only in rare instances has too much oxalate been directly linked to kidney problems and when it has, there was also a contributing intestinal problem. The doctors confirmed that the man had no other intestinal problem; also that he didn't have either a personal or family history of kidney ailments.
The doctors clarify, however, that his finding does not mean that iced tea is detrimental to your health in moderate amounts. "We are not advising against tea consumption," one of the researcher says. "If you are healthy and drink tea with moderation, it should not cause damage to your kidneys." In past studies, doctors have even gone so far as to say that a moderate amount of tea can actually fight kidney stones, according to a report by Reuters.
Other than black tea, the food chemical oxalate can be found in rhubarb, chocolate, spinach, nuts and wheat bran. While experts suggest that you shouldn't consume more than 50 mg per day of oxalate, the average American consumes 152 mg to 511 mg.
The Arkansas case appears to be very unusual, said 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 part of the research. He clarified that what the man drank was "a lot of tea."
