If you're familiar with Instagram, there's no doubt you'll have seen posts about 'BooTea' doing the rounds on various #fitspo accounts and numerous celebrity #spon posts. Health food shops like Holland and Barrett are stocking it too and it seems to be the latest trend in quick weight loss. The herbal tea works by encouraging the body to go through '…a natural process of elimination, by removing unwanted ‘toxins’ & built up waste matter, from your body via the lungs, kidneys, bowels and skin.' It's split into two 'cleanses'the Daytime Detox and the Bedtime Cleanse Tea Bags with the latter giving a laxative effect to 'naturally cleanse and detoxify your body.'
And it's here that the problem lies, because if you're taking a contraceptive pill and then experiencing the laxative effect, it could make it redundant. Although BooTea does address this in their FAQs, saying that 'BooTea may affect the accuracy of the pill IF you take your pill in the morning within 4 hours of the laxative effect', it's almost half way down the page and it's no where else on the website or on the box. For something so vital and life changing, you'd think they'd make it a bit more obvious, wouldn't you?
A thread on Netmum's has various women sharing their experiences of BooTea, and how, out of the blue, they've now found themselves pregnant, despite being on the pill. Sure, you could put this down to coincidence or the Pill not being 100% reliable but… that seems like an even bigger coincidence, don't you think? With the minimum age being 16 that you can buy it (and we'd wager that younger girls are managing to get hold of it too), it seems like a massive case of neglect on BooTea's part. So, if you are tempted by the tea, make sure you're not taking your pill during the time that the laxative effect takes hold, otherwise you could be dealing with a rather larger side effect than you'd planned for.
Like this? Then you might also be interested in:
Forget The Thigh Gap, Now There's A New Body Part Women Are Freaking Out Over
'My Clean-Living Guide To Getting Beach Body Ready' By Deliciously Stella
Follow Chemmie on Twitter @chemsquier
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.