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Page 17
| Herbal Combinations to Avoid |
| Some products sold as detoxifying teas and diet aids have potentially serious side effects. For example, some popular diet teas and capsules contain stimulant herbs such as Ma huang or ephedra, caffeine-rich herbs such as kola nut or guarana, di-uretic herbs such as juniper berry or buchu, disinfecting herbs such as uva ursi and laxative herbs such as cascara sagrada or senna leaf. All of these are useful and effective when used appropriately, but they don't belong in herbal tea blends sold to the public for weight loss or detoxification, especially with vague labels that encourage their frequent or daily consumption. Some of these herbs are ingredients in well-designed herbal cleansing products, in which case they are combined with other plants that help balance their action, but to rely on ephedra, caffeine and laxative or diuretic herbs to speed the metabolism, suppress the appetite and cause rapid weight loss is potentially dangerous. Just as ephedra created adverse publicity for herbal medicine when it was implicated in the deaths of young people who took overdoses seeking a legal "high," so have some dieter's teas been implicated in the deaths of young |
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