Teen Was Drinking 3 Glasses Of Green Tea Per Day. What Happened To Her Left Doctors Stunned

A 16-year old English teenager was feeling terrible, with pains all over her body and feeling dizzy and nauseous. She consulted a doctor, according to whom she had symptoms of urinary tract infection, prescribing her proper antibiotics to treat it. The girl became sicker and more ill after taking just 2 doses of the prescribed medicine, so she rushed to the emergency department. The doctors from the local hospital noticed that the whites of her eyes and her skin had turned yellow, a clear sign of jaundice. Her condition was serious and she needed critical attention. Since her liver was inflamed and swollen, the acute medical care team thought she had a hepatitis. As she was relatively young for such diagnosis, the doctors questioned about the cause of it, so they analyzed the circumstances that brought her there. The doctors were shocked by their discovery. The girl said that she hadn’t consumed any alcohol, taken any prescription or illegal drugs, that she never had a blood transfusion and she hadn’t recently traveled abroad. So nothing she had experienced or done could have been the reason for her hepatitis. The doctors continued investigating, and they discovered that she had ordered 2 green tea packages from China, and that she had consumed 3 cups of the tea daily for the past couple of months. Her purpose was to control her appetite and to lose weight. But because the instructions on the tea boxes were written in Chinese, she wasn’t able to understand them, so she didn’t have the slightest idea about the exact content of the tea. The doctors tested a sample of the tea, and once they saw the results, they ordered the girl to stop consuming it immediately. The test results showed presence of the evergreen shrub Camellia sine-sis, whose leaf buds and leaves are used in the manufacturing of green tea and many other teas. This ingredient had been previously connected to hepatitis and liver damage in women who consume green tea extracts and supplements, so the cause of the girl’s condition was precisely this. There were some patients who suffered serious damages of their liver, thus needing liver transplants, and some cases were even fatal. Moreover, there are big chances that other similar chemicals were included in the tea to provide stronger weight loss effect. The journal BMJ Case Reports shares the statements of the doctors who treated the girl, who say that hepatitis induced from pesticides is indeed possible, especially from products ordered via Internet which are not properly and insufficiently regulated (usually from developing countries). They recommend extra cautiousness when using teas ordered via Internet with unclear content and quality, or avoiding them completely. After 2 months of stopping drinking green tea, the girl recovered and the function of her liver was restored. Doctors use this example to emphasize the fact that drinking green tea in excessive amounts can cause liver disease, and that many varieties of the tea can include harmful substances such as pesticides. You should always go with a well-known brand of green tea, and consume it in limited and safe amounts. Via Sun-Gazing