What causes an otherwise healthy person to develop a dramatic renal failure?
“On further questioning, the patient admitted to drinking 16 eight-ounce glasses of iced tea daily.” And then it made sense.
The man had been brewing the tea at home, and luckily, despite the Southern tradition, it was unsweetened. Black tea constitutes upwards of 80 percent of the tea consumed in the United States, and it is high in oxalate, a chemical that is a metabolic byproduct in many plants. If a person is eating a lot of those plants, oxalate can build up in the kidneys and lead to renal failure. In this case, the doctors did a biopsy of the man’s kidneys and found oxalate throughout the renal tissue.
“I wouldn’t tell people to stop drinking tea,” nephrologist Randy Luciano of the Yale School of Medicine told the Associated Press, attributing the man’s renal failure to the fact that his intake constituted “a lot of tea.”
“Two to three glasses [of tea] would be considered safe if you are not eating other oxalates,” the UCLA nephrologist Ramya Malchira told Medline Plus. “However, if someone were also eating high quantities of high-oxalate foods such as spinach, even two or three glasses could be too much.”
This article was originally published on www.theatlantic.com. Read the complete article here.
*Image of “tea“ via Shutterstock
