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. (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.
"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 few hundred times. It could be cinnamon and you'd have health consequences.
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.)
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.
>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?
Not only this, but the levels of herbicides+pesticides in grocery-store brand teas is apparently terrible.
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.
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.
Paleo Survival MMO game. All players are required to use an omnidirectional treadmill for movement control, and your nutrition for the day is determined by the resource nodes you harvest. You have to form raid parties and take down whales, mammoths, bison, razorbacks, or aurochs in order to get larger quantities of meat. If you die in the game, you are required to donate one unit of whole blood, and will suffer a crippling movement speed malus every time you log in, until you do. (So don't die more than once every two months.)
I should stop now, before someone starts thinking this might be a good idea.
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, 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.
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 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, 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.
Right, I know someone who has a severe potassium deficiency and through multiple methods (including but not limited to increased milk & banana consumption and a large potassium pill) gets to where blood tests return "low" rather than "dangerously low"
Oh yes, if only people ate a perfectly balanced diet and had time and resources to know how to get the exact quantity of every ingredient.
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.
Without knowing your deficiency, you're either taking a comically meaningless dose (why even bother to take a 5ug dose if you're at a 250ug deficiency?) or risking overdose by swamping your system with the 250ug over the counter pills while not actually being deficient.
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."
The problem is: Doctors will only test for _suspected_ deficiencies. I'd love to know my vitamin levels, but I don't believe my doctor would be as enthusiastic about multiple blood tests to satisfy my curiosity.
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 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.
> '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.
If I am 15-20% heavier than average human, then getting extra 15% of minerals with supplements sounds like a good idea to actually meet daily requirements. You make claims that we are all OK and shouldn't take anything, but you have no clue what I eat, how much, or what are specifics of my body - that's not very scientific statement. I still haven't seen anything scientific stating that 15% extra intake in most common minerals should bring anything but benefits.
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.
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.
I do eat quite a lot of broccoli but I still don't fancy eating 7 heads every day -- enough to cover two dinner plates.
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.
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.
Then maybe the RDA is just wrong. If we can't eat enough healthy food to sustain us without becoming obese, then the numbers are wrong. I mean, how could we have possibly made it as long as we have as a species if we are only now realizing that we can't eat enough good foods to be healthy???
It wasn't poor health killing people at 30. The leading cause of death at that age was hunting accidents. Besides that and the high infant mortality, people otherwise lived to ~70.
In addition to trukterious' point, which I agree with, I would echo that the idea that the RDA is just wrong is also a distinct possibility. Take a look at this: http://blogs.creighton.edu/heaney/2015/02/13/the-iom-miscalc... Ponder what it implies about the other RDA values. And look at the date. It wasn't that long ago.
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.
This seems like an example of the naturalistic fallacy.
Why assume that food with the optimally healthy composition of nutrients exists in nature? People can survive just fine without being maximally healthy.
I didn't say "maximally healthy". It is, however, rather obvious that we were healthy and able to last this long and THUS the foods we had to consume gave us what we needed without having to take supplements.
" So when do you not get enough of it? When you don't eat much food, or not enough of certain kinds of foods."
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.
Vitamin D supplementation is also sketchy and hotly debated topic in. Everyone agrees that it is important, but the currently accepted lower limit and whether you need to supplement if you are below is disputed. That limit was set based on extrapolating observations that were not fully controlled. So that limit has limitations basically.
If you are healthy you shouldn’t bother with vit D suppl. If you have health concerns please do, but from a reliable source/brand. Supplements are not regulated.
Depends also on your skin tone. Generally the paler you are the more effective you will be at generating vitamin D at higher latitudes, even if it does result in easier burning.
Those with darker skin in high latitudes typically need more vitamin D in their diet/supplements.
Both are pretty easy to get, though. I personally eat a lot of broccoli and tend to eat red, fatty fish once a week. Unless the doctor says something, most folks won't need to take those supplements. It is a lot more difficult to meet your vitamin D needs through food, however.
Magnesium deficiency/insufficiency is almost as common as vitamin D's. If status hasn't been verified by something like an RBC or WBC magnesium test, then it isn't really known.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
Vegetables are nutrient-dense - no question there. And I was on a mostly vegetarian diet when I did competition bicycling in my youth, simply because I just couldn't get enough nutrients any other way.
The problem with a pure vegetarian diet is only that it doesn't cover all your needs, or not completely at least. The trace elements again. If you eat enough of it, no problem in general. If you eat like a bird you may have a problem. And may need some kind of supplements.
FWIW, B12 is something that everyone gets from fortification. It's just that, with animal products, it doesn't need to go on the ingredients label because it gets there by putting it in the animals' feed.
Last year I was in a hospital renal unit and the guy next to me had had total kidney shutdown from taking to much Zinc - Interaction with other meds they thought.
How do you, or actually how does the OP knows that it is the green tea part of the supplement, and not everything else not otherwise on the labeled that is killing is liver.
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.”
Always get your nutrients/ antioxidants/ vitamins from its natural form, if you want the benefits of green tea then drink green tea that way you'll get all the benefits from it (water intake, refreshing and such) and will never risk overdose.
NutrEval, a comprehensive hormone panel, a thyroid panel, and genetic testing. Keeping everything in the preferred range (for a 25 year old; can get more involved as time goes by) may be a better approach.
Did anyone else see a dosage that he was actually taking for these green tea supplements? It seems to be missing from the article but is arguably the most important point.
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?
Seems especially dangerous in the case of a "weight loss" supplement where the people taking it might have some early form of weight-related diabetes and not even know it yet.
Yeah...the second I saw his Pic I knew this guy was a mess. At that age with a history of American diet he had to be primed with serious health issues. Can't excersize that away.
I'd be surprised if it was anything other than the "dosage" stated on the box. Do people actually take more than the recommended dosage in the belief that the supplement will be even better for them? I guess it's possible but surely that would be newsworthy in and of itself if that were the case in this instance.
Yes, because it is very costly and difficult to get high amounts of the active ingredient that people are desperately seeking for their magical weight loss pill. People are dropping stupid amounts of green tea pills every day.
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.
If that hypothetical happened, then I would expect the article to say something like "we asked Jim how many of these pills he was taking, and he couldn't remember, but somewhere in the region of 3 per day".
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 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)
> 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.
As another poster said, it's all about the dosage. Anything can be a poison. Even water - there have been several cases of people dying from drinking too much water, some side effect of taking ecstacy - they felt thirsty however much they were drinking.
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.
I'm going to go out on a limb, just to be contrarian, and say that no amount of perfluorodecalin is poisonous. You can immerse yourself in it, fill your lungs with it, fill your entire digestive tract with it, and replace a significant amount of your blood with it. It is completely inert to biology, and is readily permeable to atmospheric gases.
There is no 'dosage', because—as mentioned in the article—these capsules are classified as food, not medicine:
> 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.
Same with water, table salt (NaCl), coffee, pomegranate juice and many other things.
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.
Average caffeine pill is 100mg (roughly on par with a cup of tea or coffee). Caff can be fatal for adults at about 10g of consumption (Heckman 2010) - about 100 caffeine pills.
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.
They might classify them as food but they’re not Whole Food. There’s a large difference between eating a whole food and taking out a single molecule from something and wrapping it in a bunch of filler material. The pills they showed looked like powdered tea, but I’d bet he was taking something much more concentrated.
There is no official "recommended" dosage and often the "maximum" dosage is just a guess too. Not the same as not being able to determine the dosage in each capsule or pill.
Not only that, this guy obviously has serious genetic issues. He is sickly.
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.
I work in a transplant hospital ( for liver and other organs ) and we see A LOT of people with liver damage from suplements ( green tea, valerian root, etc ) I would recommend against any supplements unless you clear them with your doctor, some are ok like VitD ( in the correct dosage ) others are downright dangerous.
As i mentioned above, talk to your doctor, there is no way to know what your specific situation requires ( also good advice is dont take advice from random people on the internet )
Must be an awful lot... Why do people when they read ‘x is good for you’ or ‘x might cure y’ go completely overboard. We had these ‘fasting might help prevent Alzheimer’ and the articles contain something about 24 hours low calory etc; then I read HN and Reddit and see people, responding to the article, doing 2 weeks water fast saying it is da bomb. There was an article about coffee preventing (...) liver cancer; people responding eating packs of raw coffee beans, drinking liters of coffee etc. All vitamin news is the same; people taking handsful of then dangerous amounts of vitamins. Moderately seems key to all.
Probably slightly more than 6 cups per pill if we assume that each pill contains 500mg catechins. The daily limit for someone who weighs 70kg is around 700mg which means one pill per day is the maximum.
You're aware that beta carotene, which was hailed as a super food suplement before the term even existet turned out to be carcinogenic? Uups!
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.
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 day!). In addition, there are many confounding factors with population-wide studies compared to clinical studies.
Honestly its not impractical if you just replace your coffee with it. I probably average over 6 cups per day, and don’t really do it out of any health concern at all.
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.
Interesting thought. Matcha is powdered whole tea leaves, so one would be consuming far more of the internal ingredients of the leaf than they would by having other green teas, where the leaves are just being steeped in water.
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
You are probably safe if you drink about as much Matcha as people who regularly drink Matcha. That is a cup or two a day. Drinking Matcha is supposed to be a ritualistic action, its preparation takes a bit of time and it should be drunk in a mindful manner. It's not a drink where you prepare a large amount and drink it throughout the day.
I'm in a holding pattern to since more than 6 weeks now because of increased values of the liver. No alcohol, no smoke, always trying to be fit with 3x week sport.
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.
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.
Byopsy found a light inflammation of the tissue, but nothing was considered harmful and cleared even more the case of hepatitis-free condition.
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)
I eat mainly home-made food, using fresh vegetables and fruit, using as less as possible deep-frozen or ready-made food.
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.
There are at least two big problems with supplements in the US: Their benefits and potential harm have not been evaluated by a rigorous scientific process, and it wouldn't matter if they had been because the potency, quality, and purity of their ingredients is almost entirely unregulated.
Yep. If you research green tea throughly this comes up as a major concern leading one to learn that it is very difficult to obtain any green tea that is free of toxins. Supposedly one of the best was regular Lipton tea bags.
There is a chance that Hydroxycut was actually something good overall. There were 23 reported cases of serious health problems and apparently one death. Maybe we can triple that, as not every case will be reported. But this has to be compared to the negative effects of consuming something common, e.g. coffee. There were a million units sold each year and assuming it was effective in reducing fat among a percentage of overweight people, the lifespan of an average user might have easily increased, not to mention the quality of life. I don't think this would convince the public or the regulators of course.
Sure it isn't rocket science, but it isn't nearly as simple as "just eat a bit less and do some exercise". I've lost a lot of weight and kept it off for years. Good advice is hard to come by, and half of the advice is complete crap or so restrictive that it is difficult to follow. Even "simply eating less" isn't that simple.
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.
Per 4, I think our imposed "market" focused ideology is mostly responsible. And I am not of the belief that there are market based solutions that will get us out of the obesity problem.
Because many people have poor impulse control and it's not nearly as easy as you present. If it were, many fewer people would have issues with obesity. It's not as if those people don't know why they are overweight.
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...
> Concern has focused on a potentially toxic ingredient called Epigallocatechin-3-gallate or EGCG, the most abundant of the naturally occurring compounds with antioxidant properties in green tea, called catechins. There are likely to be a number of factors that might make an individual susceptible to harm from EGCG including genetics, and the way supplements are used.
While we're talking about things we assume are healthy (but may not be) refined Inulin may cause liver cancer — a concern if more foods use it as an additive
In This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor (strongly recommended) there is a part where a consultant has a rant about "natural not meaning safe" and mentions a plant in his garden that would kill you if you sat under it for ten minutes...
I think everyone understands that plenty of things in nature are poisonous or dangerous in other ways.
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.
The author, a junior doctor at the time, later acts the consultant what plant he was referring to and the consultant says "a water lily".
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.
Slightly surprised that tree isn't native to Australia - I guess though that pretty much any tree of a decent size will potentially kill you if you stand under it long enough!
I can't find the section in the article where his doctors provide any convincing rationale that his liver damage was caused by some green tea extract he briefly took a long time ago.
I started using this kind of supplement -among others- and never used to eat any pill itself: instead I dissolve its content and try not to drink the particles that do not dissolve in it (like coffee sediments). Anyway liver and kidneys health are to be taken with caution when using any supplement.
I'd assume pesticides play a big role in that case. It is a known problem and most countries exporting green tea leaves aren't know for effective regulation of food safety.
This is more that a "clikbait" title. The big picture is that the food supplement is unregulated in the USA, due, in most part, to intense lobbying of the food supplement industry.
They should be mainly regulated to ensure purity standards, prevent mislabeling, and to allow quick action when a health danger is discovered (and not a just a 1-in-1,000,000 case). The supplement industry should be forced to provide independent lab testing results for each batch they sell and to list all possible known interactions and dangers on the product pages and together with the physical products, and to provide the government with total sales numbers. I'm strongly against banning supplements by default.
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...
The emphasis is on supplements, not green tea itself.
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.
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".