Drinking too much tea causes calcified bones

A 47-year-old woman in Michigan had a rare bone disease in the United States, after she drank a tea made from at least 100 tea bags a day for 17 years.

The unnamed woman visited the doctor after suffering pain in her lower back, arms, legs and hips for five years.

X-ray results revealed areas of dense bone in the spinal vertebrae and calcification of the ligaments in her arms, according to Dr. Sudhaker D. Rao, a doctor who specializes in endocrine and bone treatment. and metabolism at Henry Ford Hospital.

X-rays showed Michigan women with calcification of wing ligaments
hands and areas of bone density in the vertebrae of the spine. (Photo: Live Science)

Mr. Rao and his colleagues suspect the woman has been poisoned by flour in her bones - a bone disease caused by excessive absorption of flour (a mineral found naturally in tea and drinking water). The content of flour in the blood of this female patient is 4 times higher than the normal level.

Bone poisoning flour is an endemic disease in areas of the world with high levels of natural flour in drinking water, including some parts of India and China, but very rarely in Europe and North America. In the United States, a small amount of flour is added to drinking water to prevent tooth decay, but not enough to cause fluorosis.

Dr. Rao said, initially, the woman was introduced to him because the initial examination doctors suspected she had cancer, expressed by dense bone areas on X-rays. However, because he had been exposed to bone poisoning in his native India, he recognized her true disease immediately.

Dr. Rao explained that excess flour is usually filtered out of the body by the kidneys. But if a person absorbs too much flour through drinking tea for a long time in the case of a Michigan woman, fluorine accumulates plaques on the bones.

A few cases of bone poisoning due to drinking other tea were also recorded in the United States. In these cases, patients often drink up to 3.8 liters of tea every day.

Mr. Rao and his colleagues indicated that the patient stopped taking tea and that she had seen the symptoms of her remission later. The flour will gradually disappear when the bone corrects itself - a process that often occurs inside the body.