A 16-year-old girl in England decided she was going to lose weight by drinking green tea, so she ordered two boxes online, the Telegraph reports. Most of the ingredients were written in Chinese, but the girl spent the next three months drinking three cups a day. According to ABC News, she had lost only a few pounds when she started suffering from nausea and joint and abdominal pains. She would eventually develop jaundice. "I was very scared when I was admitted to hospital and had lots of tests," the girl says in a report published Wednesday in the British Medical Journal Case Reports. "I didn't fully understand what was going on at the time." The initial suspicion was a urinary tract infection, but it turns out she had acute hepatitis.
Doctors gave the girl intravenous fluids and medication—and made her stop drinking the tea—and she recovered quickly, ABC reports. According to the Telegraph, green tea has been rumored to be help everything from depression to breast cancer to dementia, thanks to its antioxidants. The report's authors even "acknowledge that green tea is predominantly a very safe and healthy drink." And while they didn't test the girl's tea, they believe chemical additives or pesticides were likely the cause of her hepatitis. One expert tells ABC that consumers need to be careful when buying herbal supplements or tea over the Internet. It's a lesson one 16-year-old girl learned the hard way. "I will never buy any online tea again," she says in the report. (The right kind of green tea might reduce your risk of stroke.)
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