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Green tea supplements ruined my liver

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#121

Post by robbiemitchell »

istjohn wrote: post #112
sieveoferos wrote: post #93

This is not great reporting by the BBC. Most grievously, as others have mentioned, they don't mention the dosages this guy was taking. 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.…

Strongly disagree. >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 li…

The point was that you can't make the second leap: from green tea to natural, then natural to safe.

And dosage matters.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#122

Post by Tor3 »

trukterious wrote: post #85
Tor3 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to be a competition bicyclist - daily training sessions of hours and hours. If you don't get enough magnesium, look at your diet. With normal healthy food you should get more than enough.

>With normal healthy food you should get more than enough. 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.

I had a look at https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Magnesium-HealthProfession..., and I can definitely say that with the amount of food I was eating during my bicycling years I would have no trouble at all getting my RDA.. :) But the situation would look more grim if I were just sitting in a chair all day and eating small meals just because I didn't get hungry enough to eat more.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#123

Post by jerf »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #96
trukterious wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>With normal healthy food you should get more than enough. 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.

An ounce of pumpkin seeds and a cup of black beans and you'd only have to eat 7 servings of broccoli.

The problem with that sort of suggestion is that by the time you're eating the food that high in this and the food that's high in that and the food that's high in the other, you've gotten to your ~2000 calories for the day and are still missing nutrients, plus your diet is infeasibly bland.

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.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#124

Post by bunderbunder »

vorpalhex wrote: post #119
istjohn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly disagree. >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 li…

"All things are poison, and nothing is without poison, the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison." - Paracelsus 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 f…

Also, you're usually just drinking the bits that readily dissolve in water, not the whole leaf.

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.)

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#125

Post by Tor3 »

saiya-jin wrote: post #100
Tor3 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The general rule is: You don't need supplements. Period. 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…

There are tons of edge cases where taking some supplements are much better than not taking them. Your argument about some gladiator is a laughable one - who knows what they ate 2000 years ago, what their actual health was? They needed to fight and often die, nobody cared if they have a healthy retirement. I personally take multivitamin supplements, but the key to me is moderation - half a tablet on workout day, which…

> 'who knows that they ate 2000 years ago, what their actual health was?'

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.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#126

Post by tallanvor »

Tor3 wrote: post #59
munchhausen wrote: post #38

Thank you for posting this article. It gave me pause for thought. 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, righ…

The general rule is: You don't need supplements. Period. 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…

No, the general rule is: Talk to your doctor if you're wondering if you should be taking supplements.

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.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#127

Post by dgacmu »

istjohn wrote: post #112
sieveoferos wrote: post #93

This is not great reporting by the BBC. Most grievously, as others have mentioned, they don't mention the dosages this guy was taking. 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.…

Strongly disagree. >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 li…

Tonka bean has been eaten daily by millions of people for thousands of years. It's delicious. I had some in a dessert just last month. Fantastically good.

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.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#128

Post by simion314 »

nemo846 wrote: post #33
simion314 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They mentioned that since the green tea was consumed from a long time it is clasified as food, so nobody is forced to test for side effects, dosage or effectiveness. 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…

> 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 Well in your son’s case, it’s not harmful per se according to Wikipedia, Carotenosis is harmless - you will just look orange. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenosis

Thanks, I forgot the details since this happened 10 years ago, my point stands that the juice sellers did not warned about this side effect.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#129

Post by Tor3 »

zone411 wrote: post #68
illiac_1962 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are ignoring the most comprehensive studies. Population analysis. There are populations that drink green tea regularly as a matter of tradition. Thats how this shit was discovered in the first place.

Compared to hundreds of studies about green tea extracts, many of them reported by the media, those population-wide studies had minimal effects on the public. And even those studies would usually find the largest effects on people who drink impractically large amounts of green tea, e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3103781/ or http://annals.org/aim/fullarticle/722554/relationship-betwee... (6 cups per…

6 cups of green tea per day isn't anything unusual. There's always tea ready at home (my wife is Japanese). And at work I drink much more coffee than 3 (normal) cups. I don't drink coffee at home though. But I'm getting a lot of green (and other) tea instead.

Re: Green tea supplements ruined my liver

#130

Post by [deleted] »

jerf wrote: post #123
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An ounce of pumpkin seeds and a cup of black beans and you'd only have to eat 7 servings of broccoli.

The problem with that sort of suggestion is that by the time you're eating the food that high in this and the food that's high in that and the food that's high in the other, you've gotten to your ~2000 calories for the day and are still missing nutrients, plus your diet is infeasibly bland. There are some things that if you can't get them from a normal diet are certainly most easily obtained from supplements. Vitamin…

[deleted]
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