A 16-year-old girl who wanted to lose weight developed serious health issues such as acute hepatitis from drinking a lot of weight-loss tea she bought online, as per a case study from the British Medical Journal via ABC News.
According to the news outlet, the patient told doctors in London that she had been consuming green tea she bought from the internet to shed some extra pounds. However, she was rushed to the hospital when she felt nauseous. She also felt pain in her joints and abdomen. At first, the doctors only prescribed her some antibiotics because they assessed that it was just a minor infection. However, her condition got worse.
"I had only lost a couple of pounds but then started having horrible pains in my joints, and felt very dizzy and sick. I was very scared when I was admitted to hospital and had lots of tests. I didn't fully understand what was going on at the time," the teen girl said.
Intravenous fluids and medication were given to the girl after doctors discovered that the weight-loss tea caused her to develop acute hepatitis and an inflamed liver. Researchers Sebastian Thomas Lugg of the University Hospitals Birmingham and colleagues reported, as per Tech Times, that after the girl stopped drinking the slimming tea, she quickly recovered from her illness.
Tech Time also notes that green tea is known to have a lot of health benefits such as improving cholesterol level, preventing the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease and a lot more. However, according to Youth Health, the said weight-loss tea is different from the nornal green tea, which has a high content of antioxidants. The said weight-loss tea could have a lot of chemicals and even traces of pesticides from the tea leaves used, which may have caused negative effects on the girl's liver. The teen stated that she was not aware of the tea's ingredients upon purchase as they were written in Chinese.
The head of the Tennessee Poison Center, Dr. Donna Seger, showed her concern for people who buys natural or herbal supplements online without knowing their ingredients.
She said that because it's labeled natural doesn't mean that it's harmless. Some of the "unlisted” ingredients of these products "can have very significant toxicity."
As for the 16-year-old girl, she has learned her lesson, saying, "I will never buy any online tea again or any weight-loss pills. People should be more aware of what they are buying and the side effects."