'The food supplement that ruined my liver'

https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-45971416

'The food supplement that ruined my liver'

9 hours ago

Jim McCants took green tea capsules in a drive to get healthy in middle age. His doctors now say they left him needing an urgent liver transplant, writes the BBC's Tristan Quinn
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As part of his mid-life health kick, Jim had started taking a green tea supplement because he had heard it might have cardiac benefits. These supplements have grown in popularity in recent years, often breathlessly promoted online for their antioxidant benefits, and their supposed ability to aid weight loss and prevent cancer.

"I felt fine then," remembers Jim, who lives in Prosper, north of Dallas. "I was walking or running 30-to-60 minutes, five or six days a week." He was working as a finance manager but hoped to retrain as a physician's assistant. "I was taking two or three classes at a time at nights and at weekends," he recalls.

He had been taking the green tea supplement for two to three months when he became ill. According to Jim's medical record this is the presumed cause of his liver injury. "It was shocking because I'd only heard about the benefits," remembers Jim. "I'd not heard about any problems."

After his admission to hospital, Jim went into a "holding pattern", waiting for the results of a series of blood tests to establish the seriousness of his liver injury. Then, about three weeks after his wife had first noticed he looked ill, one of his liver doctors delivered the news he had been fearing: "She said you need a liver transplant. This has to happen fast. You have days - you don't have a week."
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"If you are drinking modest amounts of green tea you're very safe," says Prof Herbert Bonkovsky, director of liver services at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in North Carolina, who has been tracking injuries linked to green tea supplements for nearly 20 years. "The greater risk comes in people who are taking these more concentrated extracts."

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.
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