"That's what we think was the cause of his kidney failure," nephrologist Umbar Ghaffar said in a local television interview. She and her colleagues extrapolate in the New England Journal, "Oxalate nephropathy may be an underrecognized cause of renal failure," implying that people might be more vigilant in monitoring their oxalate intake. Or, at least, avoiding extremes. Other kidney specialists agree.

“I wouldn't tell people to stop drinking tea,” nephrologist Randy Luciano of the Yale School of Medicine told the Associated Press, attributing the man's renal failure to the fact that his intake constituted "a lot of tea."

"Two to three glasses [of tea] would be considered safe if you are not eating other oxalates," the UCLA nephrologist Ramya Malchira told Medline Plus. "However, if someone were also eating high quantities of high-oxalate foods such as spinach, even two or three glasses could be too much."

I like this case as a reminder of the misguidedness of consumptive extremes, even of something so healthy as tea. People have developed kidney failure from oxalate-rich foods including rhubarb, peanuts, star fruit, and wheat bran. The complication is extremely rare, and can in no way be taken to mean that these foods are categorically unsafe. A rare point of unanimity among nutritionists is that fruits and vegetables are the foundation of healthy diets, even though blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries are high in oxalate and could theoretically cause kidney failure at exorbitant doses.

This is a time of binges and cleanses, all-or-nothing good-or-bad dichotomies in nutrients and food. No saturated fat, or all the saturated fat I want? Eliminate gluten because some people have celiac disease? Avoid a preservative because it can be toxic at extremely high doses? Just because a little bit of something is good doesn't mean a lot is good; just because a lot is bad doesn't mean a little is bad. Vitamin C breaks down to form oxalate in the body, and it has been found to cause oxalate nephropathy at high doses. Of course, without vitamin C, you get scurvy and bleed from your eyes. Hopefully the idea that tea and spinach could kill us, too, is only liberating.