Many in the South love iced tea, but drinking too much of it could be really dangerous, as one Arkansas man has found out.
A 56-year-old man suddenly experienced kidney failure last year and has been on dialysis since then. In May 2014, he went to John L. McClellan Memorial Veterans Hospital, where he showed signs of kidney failure, including an elevated serum creatine level. Doctors were puzzled at first, but now a letter published in the New England Journal of Medical Science shows that they believe they have an explanation for it.
The unidentified man admitted that he drank a gallon of iced tea every single day. There is a chemical called oxalate in black tea that can cause kidney stones or kidney failure, notes the Associated Press.
“It was the only reasonable explanation,” Dr. Umbar Ghaffar of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, told the AP. Ghaffar and to other doctors wrote about the case in the letter.
As ABC News notes, the man said he was drinking 16 8-ounce cups of tea a day, which means that he was consuming over 1,500 milligrams of oxalate a day. That’s obviously much higher than the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ suggested 40-50 milligrams a day.
While the authors of the letter were sure that drinking too much iced tea was the cause of this man’s kidney failure, Dr. Randy Luciano, a Yale School of Medicine kidney specialist who didn’t participate in the case, told the AP that this is very unusual. You don’t have to suddenly stop drinking tea, but drinking a whole gallon every single day is probably not a good idea.