Man's kidney failure stemmed from *too much* iced tea

“Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.”
“Everything in moderation.” is definitely a good plan.

This article doesn’t indicate for how many years he had been drinking this quanity of tea.

" … no one should be drinking 16 8-ounce cups of iced tea every day."
Agreed. See added NEJM quote above.

I agree also. I drink iced tea but, I don’t drink that much iced tea every day and I don’t sweeten my iced tea. I find myself in agreement also with @Kieblera5 – the sugar is what damages the kidneys.

I’m inclined to believe that the sugar damaged the kidneys, not the tea. He’d have the same issue if he drank that much of any sweetened beverage.

The NEMJ article clearly indicates that the oxalate contained in the large daily quantity of iced tea was the cause of his renal (kidney) failure.

“The urine sediment was remarkable for the presence of abundant calcium oxalate crystals.”

_"… a renal biopsy was performed, which showed many oxalate crystals, interstitial inflammation with eosinophils, and interstitial edema consistent with a diagnosis of oxalate nephropathy

_"The urinary oxalate excretion was elevated, at 99 mg (1100 μmol) in 24 hours (normal, 7 to 44 mg [80 to 490 μmol]).

“With 16 cups of tea daily, the patient’s daily consumption of oxalate was more than 1500 mg — a level that is higher than the average American intake by a factor of approximately 3 to 10.”

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1414481

Hmm … wow … OK, so then I will say that one should exercise moderation, as looseTman said:

“Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.”
“Everything in moderation.” is definitely a good plan.

I don’t know. However, that’s a very good question worthy of some research.

No, green tea is low in oxalates.

This article compared various grocery store teas in Poland the oxalates in the ripe puerh were almost as high as black tea. https://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=iPUdVf_GEYS3yASN_4HICw&url=http://yadda.icm.edu.pl/yadda/element/bwmeta1.element.agro-27684785-2ac8-4926-b7ee-bef006b54790/c/Evaluation_of_soluble_oxalates_content_in_infusions_of_different_kinds_of_tea_and_coffee_63__Nr_1__25_-30.pdf&ved=0CDoQFjAJ&usg=AFQjCNFL4qjW6r6xbK_PzmbnAD94rJEUQ&sig2=tAOl9w54s6gZJ0mBkIksqQ

Edit: I reread the study and there were two puerh (red teas in Poland) at opposite ends of the spectrum one had the lowest mg/100ml and the second the second highest. However the sample size was so small no conclusions should really be drawn.

Nope, read the study. There is no puerh in that study, it is all grocery store tea bags. The list of variables attributed to the oxalates in green Tetley include processing, and the list of possible variables to explain the larger statistical range founding tea bags is huge.

- http://blogs.webmd.com/healthy-recipe-doctor/2008/06/tea-and-kidney-stones.html
- http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1440-6047.2002.00294.x/abstract

Oxalate in Tea
- http://www.thewhistlingkettle.com/blog/oxalates-tea/
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12495262
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12627177
- http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=george&dbid=48

Pu-erh tea, does it contain oxalate?
(thread w/33 posts and several scientific references)
- http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?t=19927

None of those are quality sources for scientific studies. The problem with journalism is they report sensational headlines and don’t understand the studies.

The problem with this headline is that tea isn’t the only oxalate food. Chocolate and soy are high oxalate foods too. They are drawing a conclusion because he was a known tea drinker, but nobody can validly say they know everything else that man ate on top of the tea he drank. The tea alone might have been okay, but he could have been eating foods nobody would even consider unhealthy. But in combination, perhaps they were and yet this is a rare event if you look into the rate, very low occurrence.

“None of those are quality sources for scientific studies.”

Perhaps you overlooked the sources within this thread:
http://www.teachat.com/viewtopic.php?t=19927
“I did a quick search of the scientific literature for you and found that post-fermented tea (shu pu-erh and goishi-cha) have the lowest levels of oxalate compared to black tea and green tea. This wouldn’t apply to sheng pu-erh unless it’s been fermented by aging.”

- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0021967398003409

True Cwyn they are all grocery store teas though not all are bagged. I have the quince tea by bioactive ( it’s loose) and all the Sir Rodgers teas are I have had in the past are loose leaf. I wouldn’t blame that they are high quality teas but they are decent. Most of the polish companies classify puerh as red tea all of the ones I have seen have been ripe puerh. Given that this is only one study using only one tea and really is nothing to draw conclusions over.

The other thing to hear in mind is that even if this was representative is that generally we drink one tea over multiple infusions and this would not compare to the oxalate intake of someone drinking black tea made from new leaves several times a day.

looseTman, did you check the Science Direct link? The electrophoresis testing of tea samples diluted 5x with added chemicals to see if they fluoresce is irrelevant, are you sure this is what you meant to copy? Unless you can explain the relevance…

The tea in the study is from tea bags. We know from tea bag processing that the tea in tea bags frequently consists of swept up fannings off the factory floor, and broken tea dust with almost no controls. This is not even close to a comparison with freshly pressed puerh tea cakes or controlled factory fermentation.

This is exactly what I’m trying to say too. These types of headlines are meant to create buzz and make money, no one publishing this crap cares about facts if even they can understand the material enough to find a fact. This headline just makes me angry.

The NEJM article doesn’t state that tea is the only possible source of oxalate.

Per:
A Case of Iced-Tea Nephropathy
N Engl J Med 2015; 372:1377-1378April 2, 2015DOI: 10.1056/NEJMc1414481

“Black tea is a rich source of oxalate, containing 50 to 100 mg per 100 ml, a level that is similar to or higher than that in many foods considered to be rich in oxalate.3-5”

“We speculate that oxalate nephropathy may be an underrecognized cause of renal failure. In cases of unexplained renal failure in which proteinuria is absent and abundant oxalate crystals are present in urine sediment, a thorough dietary history should be obtained, because the kidney dysfunction could be a manifestation of oxalate nephropathy from an oxalate-rich diet. The case presented here was almost certainly due to excessive consumption of iced tea.”
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1414481

Per: Dr. Umbar Ghaffar of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock.
“While he’d had diabetes, that didn’t cause his kidney problems”, she said.

This is what scientific researchers call “an opinion piece,” it is not a peer-reviewed research piece. It is a one page opinion piece. Academic journals contain, in order of reliability and validity: opinion pieces, literature reviews, case studies, and research studies. Opinions are like hemorrhoids.

This article is a case study in one of the most respected American medical journals. I didn’t claim it to be a peer-reviewed double-blind placebo-controlled randomized clinical trial.

I think his medical team would of have a more history on the guy, but who gives a crap, the tea part sounds fun!

I’ve worked with a bunch of people who screwed their kidneys and later died from it. They didn’t get on the news cause know one cares they ate a crap diet or drank mouthwash to get drunk. They shoulda drank tea to get on the news!

Drank mouthwash to get drunk?!

Correct, a case study report of a patient who drank excessive quantities of iced tea. Totally preventable with moderation. Not an epidemic.

Et tu, Brute? … ;-)

ABC News – Drinking Gallon of Iced Tea Daily May Have Caused Arkansas Man’s Kidney Failure, Doctors Say
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/drinking-gallon-iced-tea-daily-caused-arkansas-mans/story?id=30065578

Reuters – Massive tea consumption linked to kidney failure
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/04/01/us-tea-overdose-kidney-damage-idUSKBN0MS5FT20150401

Many others – https://duckduckgo.com/?q=news+kidney+failure+tea&ia=news&iai=16

Of course everyone is picking up a sensational headline piece. “It’s gone viral,” that is exactly what they want. There are new health headlines every week.