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Drinking green tea has always been touted as an excellent way to reinvigorate metabolism, boost energy, and even lose weight.
Because of green tea’s incredible health benefits, it’s no wonder why health and fitness companies have turned the powerful tea into pills, supplements, and powders.
We don’t normally think of green tea as something that could be potentially dangerous to the human body, but one man nearly died from ingesting it.
27-year-old Matthew Whitby didn’t even think twice about buying protein supplements made with green tea extract online.
Packed with seemingly all-natural ingredients, like green tea extract and tropical fruit garcinia cambogia, the supplements seemed exactly like what Whitby needed to improve his workouts.
Not long after taking the green tea supplement, however, Whitby was told by his doctors that he probably only had two weeks to live.
According to MSN, health experts expect that it was probably the green tea extract in the protein supplements that caused Whitby to suffer sudden liver failure.
In a handful of individuals, American College of Gastroenterology reports, green tea extract can prove to be toxic enough to cause liver damage.
Dr. Herbert Bonkovsky, M.D, explained to Shape that the problem likely lies with green tea’s polyphenols, or catechins.
As it turns out, catchetins can actually work against the body’s ability to metabolize food properly, which may result in jaundice, hepatitis, or liver failure.
In Whitby’s case, the young dad was forced to undergo an emergency liver transplant that required him to accept a liver infected with hepatitis B.
“I didn’t think something you could buy online or just over the counter did the damage that it did to me,” he said. “They didn’t say anything about ‘could cause liver failure.'”
