Green tea supplements ruined my liver
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
The important point to grasp behind all this concern over "supplements" is that there's no such thing as a supplement. Everything that's not a food is a drug. If something is not part of a human diet somewhere - i.e. if it's been extracted and refined significantly - then it's a drug. (Does that mean you regulate supplements? No, because then you end up in ridiculous situations like banning high doses of water-soluble B vitamins. Banning certain brands and formulations is sometimes appropriate.)
Drugs have a dose-response curve, a median lethal dose, and all the rest. People taking "supplements" (taking them seriously, beyond taking a common-or-garden multivitamin you can pick up anywhere) should be aware of this and understand the risks.
"Natural" doesn't mean safe. Polio is natural.
Not all sets of genetics tolerate all "supplements" at recommended dosages.
In vitro is not in vivo.
Animal studies are not human studies.
I got into nutrition and supplementation through bodybuilding, and within that community the knowledge that things you put in your body can hurt you, do your homework is fairly widespread and well passed-on. Unfortunately that perspective hasn't really permeated broader fitness culture.
I think the attitude of "have this problem, take this pill" (without regard for risks or better options) is mostly at fault here. I'd argue corporate pharmaceutical companies have some culpability here - "ask your doctor if X is right for you" - or don't, and just bloody do some cardio or something.
This article is only interesting if you still conflate "green tea" with "natural" and "natural" with "safe".
>This article is only interesting if you still conflate "green tea" with "natural" and "natural" with "safe".
Green tea _is_ natural. And I conflate "consumed daily by millions of people for thousands of years without incident" with safe. Green tea is not an obscure herb like echinachea or ginko biloba. The idea that putting it in capsules would make it dangerous is not obvious at all. It sounds like magical thinking. So the fact that it is true, and it is in fact dangerous, is actually quite curious to my mind.
Think about the amount of green tea (the plant) that you actually consume in a cup of tea. Even if it's loose tea and you've done a sloppy job, perhaps a few granules.
Now imagine popping a couple of capsules packed with the stuff every day. All of a sudden your intake of something has spiked a few hundred times. It could be cinnamon and you'd have health consequences.
Go to a tea shop and order some Dragonwell, and drink it. Then have a bowl of matcha. You will feel the difference, and it can be a rather alarming one.
Edit: Why that's a big distinction: Your body typically flushes water soluble chemicals fairly easily. It has a harder time with the ones that aren't water soluble, so they tend to accumulate over time. So capsule of tea leaves is probably not the same thing as a cup of tea, from a pharmacological perspective, and theres good basis to assume that it has a lot more ability to hurt you. The same goes for pill version of traditional medicinal teas (echinacea, kava kava, etc.)
Funny that you picked that as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon#Toxicity
Same thing: tasty, used for ages, but problematic in large quantities.
And dosage matters.
The seeds contain 1-3% coumarin. In large quantities, it's toxic to the liver and kidneys, and is banned as a food additive in the US.
As others noted, there are a lot of things we consume in normal doses that if you consumed 10-50x as much would likely cause problems for at least some percent of the people who eat them.
Exactly: try drinking 50x as much water as you normally do. You'll probably die of water poisoning. Is water a poison?
No it's not. Green Tea is a manmade liquid made from natural leafs. And those leafs are usually not eaten over a longer timeframe.
I've had a friend who worked at a chemical testing lab for a grocery chain who flat out stopped drinking tea - even organic certified - after running the tests for the client. Every single brand tested positive for quantities a trained biochemist wasn't comfortable with.
I can't imagine how bad concentrated extracts are.
I get the sentiment, but it's not quite that simple. For example, certain kinds of red yeast rice are banned for sale in the USA because they contain medically significant amounts of lovastatin.
And also some food is a drug :)
Pedantic, I know, but I think the parent's real point (pay attention to what you put in your body) is only strengthened by the fact that this line is blurry.
"Walking is man's best medicine." --also Hippocrates
There's a syllogism in there somewhere. Probably about soup made from worn-out shoes.
I should stop now, before someone starts thinking this might be a good idea.
You could create a drone flight simulator with a Pokemon UI to "capture" the animal and return it.
I have been taking a green tea supplement occasionally. I saw it in a vitamin store, and bought it because of the supposed benefits of antioxidants. I figured - I have a stressful job, I live in a polluted city and do drink alcohol - I probably need the antioxidants. Plus, something that's made out of green tea sounds safe, not likely do any harm, right?
Well. I am disposing of the supplement, obviously. More to the point, though, I have to revisit my whole thinking process around supplements. I take a bunch of them, and it's purely on the basis of "I read a study somewhere or other that this is supposed to be good for you" - and not because I have a specific health concern that I need to address.
This approach suddenly does not seem so sane anymore, and I need to take a step back and rethink what I am doing here.
It's amazing how easy it is to gradually lose touch with your common sense, simply because you read the "right" subreddits (in this particular case, /r/nootropics), and start to subscribe to the hype.
Iodine protocol. MSM lotion.
That's because supplements provide (or are supposed to provide) trace elements that you need, but you only need a little bit of it. Like minerals and certain vitamins etc. The thing is - you basically need the same (trace) amount of it, whatever your lifestyle is. And you get it through eating a normal varied diet (e.g. a little meat, vegetables, some fish and seafood when you can, some (unprocessed) grains). So when do you not get enough of it? When you don't eat much food, or not enough of certain kinds of foods. Say, if you are a vegan with a sedentary life style. You're simply not getting enough of the trace elements through the restricted type of food you eat. If you're an athlete and you're also a vegetarian then you don't actually need food supplements at all - you're eating a lot of food due to the energy requirements and you'll get enough of it. Think Roman gladiator - they were vegetarians. No supplements needed.
For some reason a lot of people think that you need supplements if you excercise a lot, while it's in reality the other way around.
No, I looked into it some years ago and it seems unfeasible. For instance you'd have to eat about 15 stalks/heads of broccoli daily to get the RDA of magnesium, and that amount is likely suboptimal.
So I take a magnesium tablet before bed. Less work to prepare and to digest.
The present moral aversion to supplements seems faddish to me. We've gone from one extreme in the 1960s where everyone looked forward to taking all food in pill form, like fictional astronauts, to another extreme where supplements of any kind are frowned upon by many including in the medical establishment. Some supplements don't absorb very well, it's true, and some consumers are irresponsible -- yet atoms are atoms and molecules are molecules regardless of the source.
There are some things that if you can't get them from a normal diet are certainly most easily obtained from supplements. Vitamin D, depending on your location, is certainly one. There's reasonable evidence that magnesium is another. IIRC, there's a couple of others where even eating a normal healthy diet won't really get you to where you ought to be. There's also plenty of vitamins where unless you eat a really crazy diet, or you've got some sort of absorption disorder (I'm in that camp so I've had to learn more about this than I really would have cared to), you're never going to be deficient, because you get plenty. Vitamin C, for instance, is effectively impossible to be deficient in. There's a lot of ongoing debate about the virtues of doses higher than "not deficient", but you'd have to go out of your way to get scurvy in the modern world.
Partly due to agricultural soil depletion of certain elements like magnesium, zinc, iodine.
Btw our prehistoric ancestors weren't especially healthy either:
Well, maybe yes or maybe no
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915751...
I just pulled a fairly recent bottle of CostCo Vitamin D out here, and it's still using a value of 800IU as the RDA.
Why assume that food with the optimally healthy composition of nutrients exists in nature? People can survive just fine without being maximally healthy.
RDA of magnesium is ~400mg, which is reachable with ~300g of cooked salmon or halibut (~600 kcal), or 350g cooked navy beans (~250 kcal).
The exception to this is Vitamin D... if you live in certain areas of the world. In general, the closer you live to the equator, the less you'll need this supplement during the winter. I wound up with a low level last winter - enough to go to the doctor for testing. My other nutrients were just fine: I'm mostly vegetarian and eat fish about once a week.
I have to take the supplements from September through May. The other months I have the choice to take them. If I do not take them, I'm supposed to be outside for at least 15 minutes daily with exposed skin. Minimally short sleeves. I still take the supplements because I wear long sleeves for a good amount of summer.
This is the only supplement I see generally recommended here (Norway) simply because the way the sunlight is in winter.
Those with darker skin in high latitudes typically need more vitamin D in their diet/supplements.
Saying "you don't need supplements" is naive idealism.
And here's the catch, "healthy people don't need supplements" but how many people are taking multivitamins and hence supplementing a dietary deficiency?
"Don't take vitamin D" until you have an issue and then have to go to the doctor?
> Think Roman gladiator - they were vegetarians. No supplements needed.
Suuuuure. Did you do a blood test on them? I'm not so sure the lion's diet was balanced in the end though.
Typical supplement dosages: from 5ug to 25ug
So no, unless you eat Vit D supplement like candy you won't have a problem
Your fear of overdose is misfounded. You have to try really hard. Deficiency, on the other hand, is endemic.
"Vitamin D deficiency is a major public health problem worldwide in all age groups, even in those residing in countries with low latitude, where it was generally assumed that UV radiation was adequate enough to prevent this deficiency, and in industrialized countries, where vitamin D fortification has been implemented now for years."
I personally take multivitamin supplements, but the key to me is moderation - half a tablet on workout day, which has all the vitamins in 50% daily dose, and range of minerals of 15% daily dose, drank with lunch. No crazy doses of something specific. It helps with regeneration of muscles, joints and whatnot. Actually, my teeth got measurably harder according to my dentist after I started this regime.
The thing is, I work out these days 5x pretty hard during work week (weights, various running/cardio/intervals), mostly 1x climbing session on the evening, and 1-2 multihour hikes with 5-15kg backpack over weekend (or something similar). Those advices of daily dosages are for people smaller than me (188cm, 93kg), doing fraction of exercises compared to me. Could I do all of this without any supplement? Of course. But so far I haven't heard any solid reason why, because it measurably helps in many aspects of my health and wellbeing.
That's not so difficult as you think. What you eat is preserved in your teeth and bone. See https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-did-gladiators-ea... As for what their health was - again, you can find out a lot from bones. And, as you said, they needed to fight. You don't do that for very long without a certain level of health.
When you describe your exercise regime you seem to assume that more exercise == higher doses (of trace elements) needed. But that's the thing: For nearly all of the common trace elements, it doesn't change. Of course it varies with weight - there's a difference between a 45kg small woman and a 100kg man. Probably. But your size and weight is well inside the general and means very little in this respect.
What minerals can be used for - Mg for preventing muscle cramps (scientifically and practically proven), Fe for altitude acclimatization (more red blood cells to transport oxygen), Ca for teeth and bones. Its proven that weightlifting makes your bones denser/thicker, so I supply my body with a bit of extra of material.
As for Vitamins, water-soluble will be washed away (and its always good to have a bit extra of vitamin C), and the fat-soluble are actually less than recommended doses last time I checked (particularly Vitamin D, and as said I take 1/2 of it).
What I consider important is to take it with big meal which contains tons of stuff - especially fats and some fiber. That way body has a more gradual intake of these, and stays in stomach/intestines for longer.
How do we know that none of this is placebo.
I'm unsure what the sedentary life style has to due with not getting adequate nutrition. A balanced vegan diet generally will easily cover all your bases. The only worry is B12, and even that is easily overcome with fortified milk alternatives.
Just look at Jon's food plans for example. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCE-LXXVl3u9yJO3WRGTrEoA
Hell, I eat a plant based diet, live a fairly sedentary life style while maintaining a balanced diet, and my full panel blood work taken at six month intervals comes back with no issues.
It's easy: You need a certain amount of trace elements every day: Some iron, some minerals, etc. The food you eat contains a bit of that. If you don't eat enough of that food, you don't get enough of the trace elements. A balanced vegetarian diet is fine, but if you eat little (and you will, if you only need, say, 1500 calories a day), you may not get enough of everything. When that's said, maybe you do - depending on exactly what you eat, but as you said yourself, B12 could be a problem.
Go biking - hard - for four hours after (physical) work, and you'll have to eat enormous amounts (relatively speaking) of the same food, and you'll definitely get enough of everything.
The biggest problem is for those who try to live on uncooked vegetables. For some reason they think that it's just the thing, but humans evolved away from that diet a very long time ago, before we were homo sapiens. We don't have the jaws, the teeth, the guts to digest enough nutrients from raw vegetables only. If you live on that, you'll need supplements.
But let's go back to my initial statement: "The general rule is: You don't need supplements." What you are saying doesn't contradict that. What I meant with my too long additonal comments was just that the more you need to eat (e.g. due to exercise), the less supplements you need - if you ever needed any at all. Which is the opposite of how certain "health" and training magazines state it.
I did not present a counter argument for your initial statement. That was not my concern and I agree with your statement.
The main issue was the conclusion you were drawing between a sedentary lifestyle on a vegan diet. Considering vegetables are some of the most nutrient-dense foods relative to their calorie content, sedentary vegans following a diet rich in these low-calorie nutrient-dense foods will have an advantage over people who consume animal meat and follow the same calorie count.
Your generalization potentially puts people in harms way.
A varied diet is not always enough - some vitamins and minerals affect how others are absorbed and whether or not they are available to your body. And heavy exercise can cause deficiencies if your diet doesn't contain enough of the substances that you lose while sweating, even if you do eat enough to maintain your weight and muscle mass.
I've experienced this personally. There was a time in my life where I was exercising significantly more than the average person, although obviously not as much as a professional athlete. Even though I ate enough to maintain my weight, and had a fairly varied diet, I still ended up with an iron deficiency that was almost dangerously low, and this was only caught when I had some blood tests done to help rule out causes for my sleep issues.
Most supplements aren't needed, but vitamins and minerals such as B12, D, calcium, and iron (and others, although most of those are less frequent and can take much less time to build up the necessary quantities in the body) can end up at problematic levels even when you think you're doing everything right.
Growing evidence that antioxidants are not good for your immune system.
The green tea industry is massive user of pesticide, herbicides, fungicide. Extraction process can be sketchy too using re-used solvents. Water in the process can also be contaminated.
“The content of this bottle may differ from its label.”
Anything is poisonous to the body in high enough doses.
Does the producer of these capsules (apparently Vitacost) specify a maximum dosage? If so, was Jim exceeding this recommendation? Or well under it?
Come on BBC.
> What is it about green tea supplements that might cause harm at certain doses to some people? Scientists do not know for certain. Because green tea has been drunk for thousands of years, supplements consisting of its concentrated form are regulated in the US and Europe as foods, not medicines. That means that specific safety testing has not been required, so the scientific picture of how green tea supplements might affect our health is incomplete.
Dose makes the poison, some people are capable of handling more, and some less.
Tea, among other things, has caffeine in it, and enough caffeine will kill you, but other than in pill form, you’ll likely not manage to get to the threshold because you’ll start vomiting way earlier.
It’s possible that there are other compounds harmful at high concentration. And of course, it’s not unthinkable that some of his pills were contaminated with something more dangerous.
But the dosage alone in some cases may explain enough of the damage.
Caffeine toxicity can happen much earlier, but it's mostly concerning in combination with other substances. Caff on its own ... it's really, really hard to get to a dangerous dose inadvertently.
If the substance is pure, and the dosage is correctly labeled. Neither of which is especially common for nutritional supplements.
The key to this article is the line, "catechin doses at or above 800mg may pose health concerns." Pop over to amazon and look at one of the top results for green tea extract: https://www.amazon.com/NOW-Green-Tea-Extract-Capsules/dp/B00... A single pill is 160mg.
You expect journalists actually doing their job in 2018? Get with the times.
Vitacost Green Tea Extract
Green Tea Extract (leaf) standardized to 98% polyphenols (490 mg), 80% catechins (400 mg), 50% epigallocatechin-3P-gallate (EGCG)(250 mg)
Amount Per Serving: 500mg
https://www.vitacost.com/vitacost-green-tea-extract-standard...
"In conclusion, despite of its well known favorable effects, EGCG could paradoxically exhibit nephro-toxic effect in the presence of diabetes"
Other issues could be caused if the plant supplement contains also different plants, there could be similar plants that the plant collectors could slip in(by mistake or not) (I mean in general I do not know how the green tea is collected) , or the plants could be contaminated with pesticides, so I would avoid supplements if are not recommended by a doctor. As an example my son when he was young he liked carrot juice, so give it to him daily, when we went to the doctor she noticed he had is skin colored and told us to stop, I had no idea that too much carrots can be bad (it sucks that we are told that X is good for you but not that if you take too much X you will get ill)
Well in your son’s case, it’s not harmful per se according to Wikipedia, Carotenosis is harmless - you will just look orange.
Vitamin A is a classic: Too little, and you get blind and your feet start bleeding when you walk. Too much, and you get blind and your feet start bleeding when you walk.
since one egg yolk contains around 30% of the Vitamin A you need for a day, i limit my daily consumption to 3.
I chased all this shit until I got sick of it and adopted a whole foods plant based diet. No more added sugar or refined, processed crap. Weight dropped like crazy and I walk around literally euphoric compared to before. Same for my wife. No counting calories, no fad diets, no insane excersize schedule, no supplements other than iodide (seaweed), L-Glutamine, and top grade certified fish oil with vitamin D. Those are universally accepted supplements recognized and used widely in the medical community and are not nesseaary accept it is very expensive and time consuming to acquire and eat the amount of food required to get optimal levels.
The proven use is green tea... Not concentrated catechin powder. Good luck getting your hands on that without ingesting heavy metals or other toxins. All of this comes up when researching green tea.
Why not drink green tea if you're interested in the positive effects of green tea?
Apart from its positive effects it's a fantastic drink.
And that would be influencer
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30174618
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29429153
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28904061
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28585735
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27806972
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27062963
etc.
Even studies with just "Green Tea" in their titles use green tea extracts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27797683
It's obvious that the public would not be interested in green tea without all the studies using concentrated green tea extracts.
I'm not a food scientist, but believe it's extremely problematic to focus on one component or ingredient of something, which is a rather complex combination of a lot of ingredients in a product. Green tea extract may not act the same as actual green tea for umteen reasons.
Another point is cultural context. I'm convinced (and may be talking out of my arse, but I'm still convinced) that part of what makes something like the mediterrean diet successful is cultural context. People take the time to sit down to lunch and dinner. And this matters.
If you try to repackage the exact same ingredients and wolf it down in 10 minutes in front of a tv, or during lunch at your desk it's not the same thing and does not provide the same benefits.
You're free to put me down as some esotheric crank. But my conviction is that a healthy diet is a mixture of not too much crap and sometimes a bit crap, because it's fun and makes you feel good and gives you pleasure.
Nutrition, in my opinion, is much more complex than the ingredients that you put into your body.
edit: A couple spellos
I guess the only questions there would be how concentrated Matcha is compared to the supplement forms and how much the body would absorb from it in this form. If the resulting dose is still a fraction of the supplement form, then it's likely safe if one doesn't drink a ton of it.
Thanks for mentioning this though, as a tea drinker I've been considering getting some matcha, and now I need to research more before I do
Became suddenly yellow, done the liver-biopsy, nothing came out and still with high liver values (GPT, GOT). None of doctors have a fucking idea of what I have. Done all tests against all the kind of Hepatitis, but all of them were negative.
First time it happened when I was ~15 and had to stay in hospital for a week or so until they figured out what was happening.
For me physical over-exhaustion, too much spicy food or too much alcohol can / could trigger this.
Gilbert syndrome doesn't affect any liver function tests aside from unconjugated bilirubin - a value that reflects a backup of bilirubin processing, and not a liver-damaging process.
The maximum level of GPT touched the 27 Units/L (now 9.5), when the maximum value allowed is 0.75 and the bilirubin skyrocketed as well, now at 70 (vs. 25). GOP stays around 3.5 U/L (max allowed: < 1)
My only drug that I cannot refuse are sweets. Chocolate above all, so i take my daily dose of sweet.
Alcohol is approximately ~0.5L of beer on Saturdays, when going out to eat, sometimes a glass or two of wine. At home I don't drink alcohol, only when at big occasions such as Easter and Xmas.
What I suspect is food poisoning by eating somewhere outside: hypothesis backed by the fact that my wife and my son weren't contaminated at home, so the fresh food @ home was always safe.
Quick search turned up something https://www.scribd.com/doc/24451227/Analysis-of-Heavy-Metals...
Lead, Mercury, arsenic, aluminium, copper.
Could be a concern?
Same for many edible seeds. For example pumpkin seed and sunflower seed have high hyperaccumulation capacity.
Seems to kill a couple of people a month in the UK.
Yes and no. I expect that most people’s impulse control is actually OK, in the absence of continuous advertising i.e. an obesogenic environment. Snack companies spend literally billions to psychologically profile and manipulate their customers...
1. Few tell you ways to deal with actual hunger. Frank talks about this would help: I explain that it is, to a point, something you get used to and to a point, something you learn to control after a while. It isn't that hard to wait an hour for a snack, but it is hard to simply not have a snack.
2. Most folks still need to be satisfied with food. I personally opt for eating less during the day and eating more in the evening because that is when I am the most hungry.
3. Simply being sure to eat enough fruits and vegetables might cause you to lose weight without eating less bulk. You don't need to focus on eating less, just healthier. Same goes for whole grains. You wind up eating less calories.
4. A slew of people need to learn to cook differently and have options available at times when they cannot cook.
5. American society (at least) puts a lot of emphasis on food.
6. Exercise doesn't actually help you lose much weight. In fact, you might find yourself more hungry for doing it. It does, however, help with health - but it doesn't have to be tons of stuff. It would really help if more places had safe biking and walking paths along roads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristolochia#Herbalism,_toxici...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-10-adding-refined-fiber-...
But it's also reasonable to trust our intuition that food is generally better - i.e., more easily digested and more nutritionally complete - the closer it is to its natural form.
In the linked article, the supplement in question was was far from natural; it was highly refined and concentrated.
So the cause of the damage in this case was not from consuming a natural product, but from taking a highly _unnatural_ product.
If he'd just had ordinary green tea (i.e., dried tea leaves steeped in water) once or twice a day, as millions of people have done for many generations, this would not have happened.
I think the consultant in question had a bit of a thing about people consuming large quantities of "natural" products and being surprised that this could make them quite ill and indulged in a bit of a rant.
There actually is a tree which will kill you if you hang around it for long enough (the manchineel tree), but to be fair I wouldn't expect to find it in somebody's garden.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/whatever-you-do-do-not...
I think, many do not, at all.
> So the cause of the damage in this case was not from consuming a natural product, but from taking a highly _unnatural_ product.
There is a big difference in your definition of natural and what is marketed as natural.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/06/supplemen...
In Europe, the situation seems a bit less bleak:
https://ec.europa.eu/food/safety/labelling_nutrition/supplem...
General problems are the lack of research, especially on humans, low-powered and short-term studies only, and not publishing null results. It would be nice if all supplements had safety studies on humans but with a median cost of a phase 3 trial at $19 million, it would be equivalent to a total ban, unless the government pays. Maybe some kind of an alternative system could be created where users report by themselves and all companies have to encourage users to use this system...
Lots of chinese are habitually drinking very strong green tea all day long from one these fancy termos-like transparent cups (an ages old cultural phenomena, I suppose) and there is no side-effects despite ordinary caffeine overdose.
Same is true with coffee. Societies with a coffee-culture, like Turkey or Italy have huge numbers of addicts but uncorrelated number of liver injuries.