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Will Caffeine Cause Health Problems?
numbski asks: "We're all geeks here, and I think there is no question how much we love our caffeine. What concerns me is that my fiancee has noticed how much I take in during the morning, and that I even use Diet Pepsi in addition to pain killers as a medication for headaches. So I did my googling about caffeine and addiction. In the minority, you have one report making a scientific claim that there is no such thing as an addiction to caffeine, however many other articles (not to mention marketing propaganda) suggest otherwise. Perhaps not just the sake of having an addiction is what concerns me, but whatever other side effects. I generally take good care of myself, go to the gym, exercise, play hockey, eat right. I hate to have a stroke or heart attack later on in life because of the stuff. I'd be curious to know the thoughts of others who take in large amounts of caffeine, and perhaps what their doctors have said about it. I plan on talking to my own soon, but it seems like this warrants discussion amongst those who consume the most. Would/does this prevent you from grabbing your Bawls and running like hell?"
... and it seems like caffeine might actually prevent Alzheimers.
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Since my early teen years, I was a caffeine junkie. Coffee and colas, nonstop. I used it both habitually (urg, morning, give coffee) and recreationally (yeah, drink 3 espressos and feel wacky, then stay up all night playing D&D) [yeah, yeah, nerd alert]. When Penguin Mints came out, I was buying them by the box via mail order, and eating a few every hour at work.
It got to be a bit much. Shakiness and being groggy in the morning until I dosed up were acceptable, almost "cool" within the right circles. But when I started having some stomach troubles (which apparently were unrelated) I decided on my own to give it up cold turkey.
I've been off it for a few years now, and I certainly sleep more now and feel more alive in the morning than I did when I was using it.
I still miss it every day, though.
I mostly miss the "recreational" aspect of it, though -- getting a good caffeine buzz to make the night last longer. But I know myself -- if I started drinking it "just on the weekends" or "just on game night" it wouldn't be long before I was back to my insane ways....
Now, where's my beer?
Not representing or approved by my company or anybody else.
This is my personal experience ... treat the following like you would with any anecdote - with suspicion.
I observe Lent every year - not out of some sense of religious need, but to help me break "bad habits." I find it much easier to give something up when other people around me are giving things up, and if I can kick a bad habit for 48 days, it is easy to keep on kicking it.
Last year's target for me was caffeine - no Colas, no Tea, no Excedren (read the label on that pain-killer!) nothing. I had the usual headache for the first couple of days, which then wore off.
Some background: I have had a consistent problem with leg cramps for years. It was especially bad after exercise - play three games of volleyball on a Friday night, and a few hours later my legs would cramp so strongly that I would have to lever them against a wall to get them to stop hurting. I took to taking pre-emptive doses of aspirin . . . and really stepped up my consumption of Gatorade and water on the days of the games, just to be able to play.
Lent starts on a Wednesday, so my first volleyball league match was two days after going off caffeine - and for the first time in months, I did not cramp up after the game. This continued through the following six weeks of that season.
When Lent ended, I fell off the wagon, and went right back to my colas. The following Friday, my leg cramps were back with a vengeance. When I recovered, I decided to lay off the caffeine again, just to see if there was a correlation (or to see if I was imagining things), and to date, the leg cramps are gone.
Was it caffeine, or something else that I was consuming? I have no idea. All I know is that I avoid them as much as possible, now, and I do not even remember the last time that a leg cramp woke me up at night.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
Balzac is said to have died from a heart problem induced by his love for coffee. The man was an addict. See his "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee". Of course, one also note that the guy wrote well over a hundred novels during his career so it might have been a good trade -- depends on where your priorities are. I always thought Balzac should be the patron saint of geeks and programmers.
That's because around 5 grams will kill you. I read on a webpage about caffeine that around 80 cups of coffee is lethal times 60 mg caffeine each is 4.8 grams. My high school chem lab has far more pure caffeine than that, so it is reasonable to have that warning. (Not that I know why our chem lab has three bottles of pure caffeine [I'm estimating 300+ grams] but not a pellet of Nickel (II) Chloride, which would make electroplating a hell of a lot easier.) However, it is a little difficult to kill yourself on coffee, assuming it has no side affects. On the same site, I read that around four cups of coffee a day is addictive. But then again my friend drinks Starbucks lattes with eight shots of espresso and doesn't seem to be addicted, considering he can't drive the 20 minutes to the nearest Starbucks every day. It's amazing some of the things he's done, like drinking two of his drinks when he was putting only 7 shots in, then downing two Bawlz in one night/morning.
Soft drinks in the USA use corn syrup because it is cheaper than sugar. If you go to canada or mexico to buy sugar, it's 2-3 times chea[er than in the US.
Why is that? Because US sugar producers got congress to institute quotas on sugar imports, so cheap foreign sugar (from the carribean, etc) don't make it into the US.
For a while, some candy companies imported iced-tea mix (and other sugar-laden goodies) from foreign countries to separate the sugar out of it, because it was less expensive than to buy US sugar. Of course, that's now illegal. The Life Savers plant in Michigan closed down earlier this year, and moved to canada so they could get better sugar prices.
Who benefits? The sugar companies, and the corn syrup companies.... Most people agree that sugar-based soda tastes better than corn syrup-based soda... corn syrup would not be used if it wasn't artificially cheaper than sugar.
Unfortunately, most people don't realize the true cost of sugar quotas, and it isnt' worth writing to your congressman over an extra expense you don't realize even exists.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Coffee makes us speedy, irritable, sleepless, and often causes heartburn or ulcers. The removal of caffeine is supposed to reduce some of these undesirable effects. Coffee is an addicting beverage. If you consume more than 2 cups per day, you are likely to experience unpleasant withdrawal if you stop. The minimal suffering includes a headache, irritability, and fatigue. The popular ideas that the bad effects of coffee are caused by one chemical, caffeine, is misleading. The 800 or so other chemicals in coffee include aromatic or phenolic chemicals and many are probably neurotoxic; other chemicals are allergenic. Coffee is also a crop with pesticide residues. Coffee can be allergenic and makes some people obviously sick. Chlorogenic acid is one of the allergens which coffee shares with oranges.
Tea and coffee have much in common, although they different plant products from different geographic zones. Tea contains caffeine and other members of the drug family, methyxanthines. Tea also contains tannin, a good tanning agent. The caffeine dose in a cup of coffee ranges from 100 to 160 mg. A cup of tea has 20-60 mg and 12 ounces of regular Coca Cola has 45 mg of caffeine. The symptom complex produced by tea parallels coffee. Chronic heavy tea- users have sometimes been nicknamed Tuffers. Teas are addicting and are allergenic.
Daily coffee or tea ingestion induces a 24 hour cyclic disturbance with morning arousal, irritability, difficulty concentrating, subtle levels of disorganization, clumsiness, and forgetfulness. As the day progresses, 2 or more cups later, a heavy fatigue sets in by mid to late afternoon. Further coffee doses may rouse one a bit, but then further collapse is inevitable by evening. Irritability may evolve into disproportionate or inappropriate angry outbursts, pleasure-loss, absence of good-feelings, or empathy anesthesia. It is likely that the subtle pyschopathology of moderate to heavy coffee consumption contributes to the production of unnecessary conflict and dysphoria. The subtle cognitive and memory deficits which appear after coffee intake should alarm employers who expect their employees to think, remember, or carry out skilled, coordinated acts. It may be that coffee and tea intake facilitates dull, routine, rote tasks where thinking, skill, and initiative are unimportant. The cognitive and emotional defects of the coffee-drinker should also alarm a spouse or close family member who cannot understand why the relationship is not working. Until you consider coffee and other food-factors, mental and emotional disturbances may be totally mystifiying. Early sleep may be denied the infrequent coffee user. The chronic coffee-used may go to sleep readily but sleeps poorly and awakens feeling tired and mentally clouded. Morning fatigue demands more coffee to get going. A familiar recursive loop is established following the familiar addictive sequence.
If you begin in a clear state with no symptoms and a clear mind, the ingestion of even one cup of coffee will often produce a marked and undesirable effect. The sustained ingestion of even small amounts of coffee seems to produce a subtle psychopathology. The chronic coffee user risks a variety of physical and mental disabilities, especially coffee-user-fog. If your Cuffer spouse, employer, employee, or best friend seems irritable, obtuse, unduly nasty, or depressed, nurse them through the three-day- withdrawal headache and serve nice cups of hot water instead. Coffee substitutes are definitely not recommended. Many ex-cuffers find that a "nice cup of hot water" becomes a suitable drink. Others switch to light consume, soup, or hot water, lightly flavored with lemon and honey.
During my first year of college, I drank a lot of caffeine, mostly from Mt. Dew. I was drinking probably 6 or 7 12oz cans a day.
During the 2nd half of the year I started noticing that about once a day for 2 to 3 seconds my whole body (and especially my heart) would feel like I was running in super hyper mode. It felt like everything in my body was just running super fast. I didn't know what to think of it, but it only happened once a day for a couple of seconds so like an idiot I just didn't worry about it.
Over the next couple of weeks the incidents started becoming more and more frequent until I was having one of these 2-3 second super-hyper feeling spurts once every 10-15 minutes. At this point I got scared and headed straight for the local night clinic.
When I got there they took my pulse, blood pressure, etc and hooked me up to the EKG thing and had me just hang out there and lay around for 20 minutes or so. As bad luck would have it, I didn't have a single occurrence of the weirdness while I was hooked up. After a while, they unhooked me and were getting ready to send me home, but the nurse decided to go ahead and check my pulse and blood pressure one more time.
While she was checking my pulse, I had one of the weird speed up feelings. I didn't even have to tell her. As soon as it happened she looked up at me and said "It just happened, didn't it!" and I was like "Yes, how did you know?!?! What did you feel?!?!". She had actually felt my heart skip an entire beat while she was taking my pulse!
The doctor came back in and when she gave him this new information he said "Do you drink a lot of caffeine?" I didn't even know what was considered a lot or which drinks had a lot, so I was like "I drink a lot of mountain dew, I think those have caffeine". When he asked me how many and I told him 6 or 7 a day he told me that was my problem. The feeling I had been having was kind of an adrenaline rush where the rest of my body was trying to get my heart started back up again.
I immediately stopped drinking caffeine and it took about 2 weeks for the problem to completely go away. It tapered off at about the same rate it had built up in the first place.
At the time this happened I was in really good shape. It had been less than a year since I was a 2 sport athlete in high school and my fitness level was still pretty high.
So, caffeine may not have negative effects on everyone, but I'm pretty sure I could have killed myself on it if I had kept drinking it at the rate I had been.
I used to drink around 6 to 10 mugs of filter coffee a day, along with many penguin mints, cokes and other caffeinated products.
I also had frequent migraines, an insomnia problem, and was often too tired in the evening to go out.
About a year ago I cut down my caffeine intake dramatically. Now I have 1 or 2 coffees a day, or a coke instead. No Penguin mints. The difference was incredible: Hardly any migraines, I was able to sleep at night, I was more active in the evenings. As a bonus, my pericarditus (inflamed muscles around the heart) went away completely.
I still enjoy my coffee and caffeine, but I think it should come with a health warning. We certainly shouldn't be giving so much of it to children.
Steve.
A latent existence