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Coffee Maybe Not a Health Drink!
perbert writes "Canadian researchers have published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association indicating that excess coffee drinking (4+ cups a day) could lead to an increased risk of heart disease if you have the wrong gene. In light of other studies linking antioxidants in coffee to a reduction in heart disease, who is right? Or will they cancel out in a coffee death-match?"
... and even drinking to much water. That's actually been a problem for several years now at marathons, half-marathons and other road races. People tend to drink at every water station. That lowers their electrolytes to the point they require medical help. It's actually much more common now than people dehydrating during races.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Your symptoms (rapid pulse, dizziness) could be an adrenergic response to hypoglycemia.
When this happens, do you experience difficulty concentrating? (Neuroglycopenia) And does it subsequently go away when you ingest food, especially sugar? Do you experience frequent urination during the recovery phase? If it's Hypoglycemia, it is actually very dangerous for your brain.
Caffeine's kick comes from its ability to expedite the transport of sugar from the blood to the tissues. The occasionally dangerous side effect is that if you have a problem with your diet and/or anrednal glands, since caffeine creates this metabolic illusion of an energy boost, the combination can sometimes result in depleting the blood of sugar faster than this sugar can be replenished. Then you crash dangerously hard, experiencing what insulin-dependent diabetics refer to as a "hypo."
When your brain detects low blood sugar, it triggers the release of adrenalin and cortisol which are stress hormones, and this causes your body to release emergency sugar from other sources, such as stored glucagon from your liver.
So most of the unpleasant effects of hypoglycemia are actually your body's defense against it. But you are 100% right to avoid coffee if it does that to you, since this is a warning sign. Coffee does not do this to everybody.
Whatever the problem is, things can likely be brought back into balance just by eating moderate balanced meals, and having healthy snacks between meals and before bed. If you eat a lot of sugar, take it with some protein and/or fat so that your pancreas never gets habitually braced for dealing with big jolts of sugar... because it'll get itself into a mode where it produces too much insulin at the wrong time... which can be as dangerous as the legendary diabetic insulin overdose. So ironically, too much sugar can cause hypoglycemia.
Definitely talk to a Dietician.
Possibly at some point in the future, you might consult an Endocrinologist if you've been bingeing on high-sugar foods, and you think you might be at risk of developing type II diabetes or something like hyperinsulinism or hypoglycemia. (The latter two may actually be somewhat common. It's the diagnosis for them which is exceedingly rare, since they are both very difficult to get clinically diagnosed. Pretty much only the textbook cases that present under ideal circumstances will ever get diagnosed.) You almost have to be pretty sick before an Endocrinologist will be able to help you.
Good luck...
PS:
I personally had just one episode of "reactive hypoglycemia" involving just one strong coffee, a skipped breakfast and some physical exertion, and it felt exactly like the experiences you describe having with coffee. I did not lose consciousness, but the experience did leave me with some very subtle brain damage... (which I seem to be adapting to finally after 6 weeks.)
Your dietician needs to go back to med school. Yes, aspartame breaks down to formadehyde as the tail end of the process of your small intestine converting it to methanol. Formaldehyde (from methanol) is a normal chemical to be found in your body as a normal byproduct of normal digestion.
The amount of methanol produced by Aspartame in the body is 10% of the ingested aspartame. Assuming all the methonal is further converted to formadehyde, a normal 12 oz soft drink causes only 1/6th the amount of methonal production as an equivalent drink of Tomato Juice (which contains no Aspartame, but contains other "natural" chemicals that produce methanol).
The actual numbers are this:
A 12 oz diet soda contains 225 mg of Aspartame (approximately 0.05% of the drink is aspartame). That generates 22.5 mg of methanol, or about 0.005% of the drink will become methanol. We will assume all the methanol becomes formaldehyde (worst case). The LD50 of formaldehyde is 100mg/kg. For an average male of 75 kg, that would mean 7500mg. A total of 333 sodas must be drank by this average male to assure death, and they must be drank fast enough to counteract the body's natural ability to rid itself of formaldehyde.
Of course, hyponatremia will set in, without exercise or dry heat, with drinking about 3 or more litres of fluid per hour, for serveral hours straight. 333 sodas will contain 3996 oz of liquid, or about 118 litres. Anyone attempting death through ingestion of Aspartame by soda comsumption will surely die of hyponatremia far before they have reached even small amount of their goal!
Feel free to ask your dietician to verify this!