The idea of losing weigh with little to no effort only by drinking slimming green tea sounds tempting for many people. But is it worth the risk?
A 16-year-old girl who purchased slimming green tea online was diagnosed with severe liver inflammation. The girl told doctors that she drank the tea in order to lose weight.
When symptoms like joint pain, nausea, dizziness, and stomach ache started appearing, the teenage girl went straight to the general practitioner (GP). At first the doctors thought that she had urinary tract infection, so they prescribed her some antibiotics and sent her home.
Her condition got worse after she took two doses of antibiotics. She went to emergency room (ER) at a hospital in Birmingham. Doctors wrote in the journal BMJ Case Reports that the girl was diagnosed with jaundice, also known as icterus, and that she was in critical condition.
At first the doctors believed that she suffered from hepatitis, that is how serious her condition was. She immediately received special medical care.
After being questioned by the doctors, the girl told them that she purchased Chinese green tea on the internet, because someone had told her that it could help her lose weight. The girl said that she bought 2 boxes which contained about 100 bags of tea in total. For a few months, she drank about three cups of tea per day. According to her, the ingredients on the boxes were mostly written in Chinese.
“I had only lost a couple of pounds but then started having horrible pains in my joints, and felt very dizzy and sick,” the girl told the doctors.
She stopped drinking the tea, and after the treatment the swelling went down, and her liver went back to its normal size. The girl was sent home after two months of hospitalisation.
Camellia sinensis, a species of shrub whose leaves are used in the production of tea, was one of the ingredients in the tea that lead to the girl’s illness.
There are other documented cases in which slimming tea has lead to people having liver failure and needing liver transplant, and in some cases it has even lead to death.
Image Source: phcsonline
