After a 56-year-old man shared his plight with doctors for health problems ranging from extreme fatigue to pain, doctors started figuring out the cause behind his sufferings. The doctors found that the man actually had a kidney failure because of excessive iced tea consumption.

This has implications for people who include iced tea in the list of healthy food and beverages to not allow their waistline to expand. For the Arkansas man, iced tea turned out to be deadly.

The patient was used to consume sixteen eight-ounce glasses of iced tea daily. Oxalate is present in iced tea, and excessive consumption of ice tea led to accumulation of unsafe amount of oxalate in his kidneys, leading to kidney inflammation, said Umbar Ghaffar from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

Oxalate crystals in his kidneys generated an inflammatory reaction, which resulted into scars and loss of the kidney tissue. Iced tea is not the only healthy item to contain oxalate, but peanuts, rhubarb and star fruit too. So, one should must understand the importance of their consumption within safe limits.

Academy of Nutrition recommends the consumption of 40 to 50 milligrams of oxalate daily, but the man was consuming over 1,500 milligrams of it on daily basis.

“In this case, the person was drinking huge amounts of oxalate. I would caution people against drinking that much, but drinking a glass or two would not concern me”, said Harvard Medical School professor Gary Curhan.