The popular drink, green tea is not as healthy as it seems. A teenage girl has developed hepatitis after drinking three cups a day.
The-16-year-old girl originally from Yemen, visited her GP after experiencing dizziness, nausea, stomach and joint pains. Her symptoms soon worsened and she was admitted to the Emergency Department at Birmingham University Hospital.
Hepatitis can be caused by a virus or exposure to harmful substances such as alcohol. None of these factors caused the illness but the teenager had been drinking Chinese green tea she had bought online three times a day for the past three months.
“I had bought the green tea over the internet to lose weight,” the teenager said. “Most of the ingredients of the tea I bought were 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 was ordered to stop drinking it immediately. “After ceasing green tea consumption, there was a rapid and sustained recovery of her hepatitis,” the report’s authors wrote. It’s thought that the addition of chemicals to the tea, or the use of pesticides on tea trees had contaminated the infusion.
But the authors added: “We acknowledge that green tea is predominantly a very safe and healthy drink, with antioxidant properties.”
