Slashdot Mirror
Caffeine Withdrawal Recognized As Real
Ben Sullivan writes "What many Slashdotters have long known looks set to become official: Caffeine withdrawal is for real. New research at Johns Hopkins should result in it being included in the next edition of the DSM, and recognized by the World Health Organization."
I didn't write these.
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Caffeine is bitter.
Still, I hate to see companies get away with lying like this. There are plenty of non-psychoactive bitter flavors.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
Um, try again. Maybe you need to do a little research. Caffeine indeed has quite a strong flavor, and I will bet you big $$$ to sit down and blind taste test Mountain Dew and No-Caffeine Mountain Dew.
d ing=npg&cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11444592& dopt=Abstract
My information comes from direct experience, plus I've seen documented in numerous places that caffeine has a bitter taste.
Where did you get your information? When you call people names, it looks really bad when you don't know what you're talking about.
Thirty seconds with Google produces this from the NIH's National Library of Medicine:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?hol
I prefer the taste of caffeinated Dew to non-, but that doesn't vitiate the idea that beverage manufacturers do it to addict their customers.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Because Caffeine works by stimulating your pituitary to think there's an emergency. This high level of chemically induced stress can have long-lasting health effects.
Also note that the pituitary is the "master gland" that controls your endocrine system. Knock it off kilter and you may cause all kinds of bizarre hard to track symptoms like insomnia, gynecomastia, etc.
It does take a LOT of caffeine over a long period of time to mess up your pituitary.
The DSM is nonsense, and the idea of putting caffeine dependence in there is nonsense too (I'm a research psychologist who specializes in psychiatric classification, so I do a fair amount of research on the topic).
The problem is that withdrawal by itself is not a disorder by any means--it's an indicator of a problem. You really need a lot more things to claim that someone has a substance use problem than just withdrawal. For one, use of the substance has to cause significant impairment in functioning, which for nearly all people is not the case with caffeine.
Withdrawal only being one indicator of a problem is not just significant for assessment reasons, but is also neurobiologically significant as well. Withdrawal from caffeine has been documented for some time (in contrast to what the article suggests). The real argument is whether or not caffeine is "addictive" in the sense that most people mean. Showing that your body adjusts to caffeine in a homeostatic sense does not mean that you develop a craving for it. If you take away caffeine, and you get headaches or whatever, that may only mean your body has adjusted to the state of having caffeine. It doesn't mean that you crave it--and in fact, there have been various neuropsychological studies (using imaging and all sorts of things) to show that you don't in fact crave caffeine (although you may use it to avoid the unpleasant effects of not using it).
The whole DSM is one big legal document, and there's very little evidence to suggest that its organization has any empirical basis. If you read the history of the DSM, you will become aware that it is very much a political document, not a scientific one.