Liver Damage Linked To Chinese Green Tea Used For Weight Loss: Report

Doctors from the U.K. are warning that some types of Chinese green tea, which are often used in large quantities for weight loss, could cause liver damage. 

A case study on a 16 year old girl with signs of acute hepatitis speculates that the probable cause of her illness was herbal tea containing Camellia sinensis, which is suspected of causing similar problems in other cases. The case study was published on September 23 in the medical journal BMJ Case Reports.

“I had bought the green tea over the internet to lose weight,” the patient is reported as telling the doctors. “I bought 2 boxes of 100 bags of tea and was drinking about 3 cups a day for a few months. I had only lost a couple of pounds but then started having horrible pains in my joints, and felt very dizzy and sick.”

The patient said she never took anything else and was on no prescription or non-prescription drugs. When she began to show serious signs of jaundice she was hospitalized, where doctors determined she was suffering from acute hepatitis. The researchers noted that when she stopped using the tea, she began to improve.

Buying herbal tea off of the internet and consuming it in large quantities has become a recent fad among dieters, who see it as a healthier way to drop pounds than by taking diet pills, weight loss shakes, or by going on intensive and restrictive diets. However, previous case studies and reports have linked a leaf known as camellia sinensis, which was present in the tea she purchased, to other instances of acute liver failure and liver damage. It is sometimes added to tea leaf powders or diet pills.

In 2008, there was another case study published in the Spanish Language medical journal Revista Espanola de Enfermedades Digestivas that looked at liver injuries induced by natural remedies that were recorded in the Spanish Liver Toxicity Registry. Camellia sinensis was linked to 23% of reported cases, and the researchers found it to be the main causative herb of natural remedy-related liver damage.

Researchers in the latest case study said they did not want people to believe herbal tea was unsafe, however.

“We acknowledge that green tea is predominantly a very safe and healthy drink, with antioxidant properties,” they noted. “It is the secondary or tertiary processed products, rather than the freshly made leaves, that have been described in previous case reports. This raises the possibility that it is the addition of other chemicals causing hepatotoxicity, particularly in preparations used for weight loss.”

The doctors noted that a number of factors, such as pesticides, could contaminate green tea infusions.