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Caffeine Addicts Get No Additional Perk, Only a Return To Baseline
Dthief writes "Bristol University researchers found that coffee drinkers develop a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine, meaning that it only brings them back to baseline levels of alertness, not above them. 'Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal,' wrote the scientists, led by Peter Rogers of Bristol's department of experimental psychology."
Isn't that what everyone is trying to do with their entire life?
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So either I have to use Red Bull's oddball sugar-enriched BS for a charge (which I'll probably build up a tolerance to), or seek out alternatives like - METH (it's what's for breakfast! Yummy mmmmmeth!).
I never touch coffee - it's a vile habit, especially when abused. Now that that's out of the way, barkeep, another pilsner please.
I am officially gone from
...regu drug addiction.
Coffee reaches its full potential at the 100th cup.
Populus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur...
"Force shits upon Reason's back." - Poor Richard's Almanac
As a former caffeine addict, I would *love* to see some serious studies come out describing the long term consequences to long term caffeine use. Of course, we'll never see that because there's more money behind caffeine than alcohol and tobacco, combined.
I don't respond to AC's.
When I drink coffee it helps me wake up. No more no less. Granted I could run a mile and wake up that way, but coffee does it a lot faster.
That explains so much... damn!
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
There is another stimulating effect of caffeine that the article does not address.
Caffeine is a diuretic.
I've lost all my marbles except one & It's fun to test angular & centripetal acceleration in my skull
You can have my coffee when you pry it from my cold dead hands!
So what you're telling me is that I should mainline caffeine so that withdrawal never kicks in?
Guess I'm gonna have to get started on meth now.
sic transit gloria mundi
We've known this for a very long time.
Read "Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine" -- ISBN-10: 0140268456
Heroin addicts don't really get high like they used to, they just get well.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Tolerance Yes... But it is all about keeping the body off balance. There is little doubt that coffee (aka caffeine) makes you more focused and energized. I mean to suggest that over 300 years of active "research" has no validity is kind of nieve in my mind. Sometimes so called researches have a hard time remembering this...
In real non-caffeine-addicted life, there is nothing you can do to make your brain go from 0-100 within a matter of a minute. With caffeine, you can do that.
When I come into work in the morning, I am my arshole-y, foggy, caffeine-withdrawal self. Totally useless. But then I have my cup over coffee as I work over something, and before you know it, my mind is racing along. I remember what it was like in those B.C. days ("before caffeine"). I was a thinking being back then, too, but I had no control over when. Becoming caffeine-addicted was a conscious choice.
Also, caffeine makes me like doing things that I would normally hate, like going to work. Totally worth the tradeoff.
This study asked people to 'rate their levels of alertness' after being given either caffeine or a placebo. The people who normally consumed caffeine rated their alertness levels the same after receiving caffeine as the non-caffeine users rated their alertness levels after receiving a placebo.
Now this could mean a couple of things. One meaning could be what the study authors said; that caffeine addicts need their caffeine to be at the same level of alertness that non-caffeine users need. OR it could mean that the non-caffeine users aren't used to the higher levels of alertness that caffeine gives you, and therefore don't use the same scale to rate their alertness that caffeine users do. A caffeine user may think that the 'normal' (non-caffeinated) level of alertness is actually low (because they are used to being more alert from caffeine) even though they have the same 'actual' level of alertness. In other words, non-caffeinated people might not realize how un-alert they are.
A much better test would be to actually TEST their alertness, instead of relying on a subjective self-assessment. Make them do tasks that require alertness, and measure the differences. You might get different results.
If I drink more than a cup or two of coffee I get awesome dizziness, and spectacular stomach rot. I'm jealous of those that use more to keep going, more just makes me want to lay down and give up for the day.
This idea applies to caffeine addicts. But to someone new to caffeine who hasn't developed a high tolerance, caffeine has its perks. So for addicts who want to relive those first moments, the idea is to go through periods of withdrawal intentionally in order to lower their tolerance, and then return to caffeine when needed. I do this all the time. Caution: withdrawal is not fun.
My page.
I was a caffeine freak for years. I would drink coffee from waking to bedtime, frequently I would go to bed and read and then go to sleep with a coffee mug that still some coffee in it. Sometimes on weekends when I was doing other things, I would get headaches from not having enough coffee. I would tell people that coffee did not keep me up, it merely gave me the option of wether or not I wanted to sleep. The other drugs I've been addicted to were a different story. Actually, I guess alcohol and nicotine are the only drugs that I have been addicted to. Getting off of alcohol was rough. Still smoke like 2-3 packs a week. Drink coffee in the morning. Only drink like 6 beers a week max. Getting old or something.
I have felt for sometime I needed a bigger kick in the morning.
Now I can get my doctor to prescribe
Methamphetamines.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore Trout
I don't believe it. Next you'll be telling me that smoking a cigarette doesn't actually calm me down, it just reverses the effects of nicotine withdraw!
Q.E.D.
Additionally, caffeine has mood-elevating effects. Like, thank God I'm at the coffee machine talking to the hot girl from payroll instead of at my desk being a Java monkey.
Participants rated their levels of anxiety, alertness and headache. The medium/high caffeine consumers who got the placebo reported a decrease in alertness and increased headache, neither of which were reported by those who received caffeine.
Somehow I missed the part where participants in caffeinated and non-caffeinated groups were asked to write a Perl script to automate a series of edits in several hundred files in which the substitution context was not fully understood, given a half hour deadline.
Although throwing in a bit of ADHD or whatever probably messes it up. I drink almost a whole pot of coffee in the morning, mostly because it's a habit. Sitting at the computer, early morning, be it work related or just reading the news on the weekends, never is the same unless I have a hot mug of coffee to sip on while I do it. I never feel 'more' awake, I just feel normal after a few mugs.
I will shred my adversaries. Pull their eyes out just enough to turn them towards their mewing, mutilated faces. Illyria
I quit coffee after a decade of drinking at least two cups a day. At least 4 days a week I would have three or more cups. I bought into the stereotypical "caffeinated coder" personality in the early days, and never lost the habit... ...until two months ago when I ditched it. A couple of weeks in, I dropped all caffeinated beverages.
Quitting was painful. Four-day headaches that never fade and don't respond to Advil. I broke once, walked down to Starbucks and ordered a coffee. One sip and the pain just vanished. I dumped the rest of the cup out on the sidewalk. The rule was "one sip of coffee is allowed if a headache lasts an hour." I only had four sips after that.
The difference is astounding. I snap asleep at night and wake up in a good mood. I've been told I smile more and am generally more pleasant to be around (your mileage may vary). Weirdly, I sweat far less at the gym. Having battled depression since my late teens, I have the odd 'down' day now, but generally I feel good about things. I don't second-guess myself at work and my confidence has soared.
Moral of story? If you're feeling shitty about life, and you're a big coffee drinker, stop drinking the stuff. Really, stop. No half measures, no "just one cup a week" attempts. There is no try, young Jedi. You'll feel much better .
Just be sure to keep going to the coffee shop or wherever you used to get your fix. Order caffeine free tea. You need to be around coffee while you quit. You'll want it less.
Also, the "caffeine" section of this is interesting.
You sir are a paranoid or an idiot (or both). Behold, the power of teh Google. No thanks needed.
Quack, quack.
"Baseline" is properly defined as the levels of mental alertness and physiological activation when mediated by an appropriately-high level of serum caffeine. People fall below baseline because they're caffeine-deprived.
Don't think of it as a drug. Think of it as a vital metabolic nutrient. "Caffeine addicts" are addicts the same exact way that "protein addicts" and "vitamin C addicts" are.
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine if I'm serious.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
This is the kind of finding I've the greatest trouble with. 1st, I didn't RTFA (I'm a /.er now; I don't do that). Putting that aside my problems centre on the complex issues that are couched in a few words that are presumed to carry very specific findings in the broad meaning of those words. "alertness", really? Someone has a definition for the word alertness that carries a one to one correspondence with their findings in organic chemistry. What about caffeine as a drug and a genetic predisposition to an uncommon response to caffeine? What about cultural conditioning? What about the complexity of the endocrine system? How to you isolate all the factors impinging upon a broad term like alertness and map it onto a number of cups of coffee or tea? There should be science tabloids, like those pop star, supermarket lineup tabloids, that pander to findings just as these.
The public is asked not only to have the rudimentary knowledge base to understand the article but to be able to critique findings that speak to terms like alertness.
ideopath @ play
I come at it from the other direction. I know people who won't drink coffee after 7 at night, claiming it will keep them up. They look at me like I'm some kind of mutant when I tell them I can have a large mug of it and go straight to sleep afterward.
I plan on printing TFA off and waving it under a lot of noses. Once again, geeks strut, pound our narrow chests and proclaim our mastery over humanity.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
As a three-can a day addict, I'd say this pretty much fits.
Caffeine is evil, it needs to immediately needs a tax increase of 2000% to keep the public from abusing it. Might I further suggest that flavored coffee which appeals to children needs to be immediatedly banned.
Got Code?
At first I thought the headline said "Caffeine Addicts Get Additional Perks", but I haven't had my coffee yet.
Caffeine is a known performance enhancer.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/26/health/nutrition/26best.html
Of course that is for non addicts.
perk.
Could it possibly be that the people whose circadian rhythms are least matched to the corporate 8-5 workday are the ones who are more likely to be drawn to heavy usage of caffeine to boost their mental productivity in the first place?
Could it further be possible that these same people, clinging to their (our!) chemical crutches to try to match their body's rhythms to the arbitrarily defined 'work day', would have been deemed less 'alert' than so-called morning people, even if caffeine had never been discovered?
Although I agree with the comment above, stating that self-declaration of 'alertness' level is a dodgy indicator indeed, even if the two groups were significantly different in alertness levels, there could be many other factors than the one stated (blamed?) by the study.
Sorry boys, it just does not compute.
(Besides I never could understand morning people myself...what the &%^ is there to be so cheerful about before noon, or at least before the first cuppa?)
cc
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
A helpful subject for further research would be to determine how much caffeine a person can consume without becoming addicted and thus losing the benefits.
I limit myself to two cups of coffee a week, along with a few sodas, and I don't experience withdrawal symptoms. I could probably have more without running into diminishing returns, but it's hard to know.
Unfortunately the ideal dosage probably varies widely among people due to all sorts of physiological factors. Perhaps what we need is a procedure for testing when we're approaching the point of addiction, without actually reaching it.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
The one we haven't heard about:
"Read the new book, Diuretics, by L. Ron Hubbard! It will change your life..."
without a team of university researchers. Quitting caffeine was one of the best things I've ever done.
Well let's see here, between caffeine addiction, high consumption of high-fructose corn syrup, consumption of alcohol, constant exposure to various forms of EM waves, the thinning of the ozone layer allowing more UV rays to pass through the atmosphere, and a lack of proper amounts of sleep, I (and most folks in my generation) will probably end up dying at a young age from some combination of diabetes, cancer, withdrawal symptoms, and physical stress according to the media.
I'll be damned if it won't be one helluva delicious, intense, fun, and, most importantly, caffeinated ride though.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmCjMRAzCiE
People don't seem to understand that caffeine isn't as innocent as it seems, even though it's readily available from any number of sources, including concentrated pill form. It's not a food, it's a drug, and it needs to be respected just like any other drug. Occasional use, or use as an performance booster in athletic events is fine, but like anything else it can be harmful if used constantly and increasingly.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I have to admit caffeine doesn't improve my productivity but actually hurts it by making me fidgety. On the plus side, though, caffeine gives me higher highs than I would ever have naturally. I very much enjoy the highs and consider them a luxury, with the price paid in lowered productivity.
I'm going to mod you -1 "message is split between subject and message body". Hey, wait--there's no mod for that. I guess I'll just have to post an annoying sad face comment at you :-(
It speeds the heart and increases blood pressure, but does not raise mental awareness. People who think they need it to wake up in the morning are deluding themselves. People who think they need it for energy are also fooling themselves. I wonder when people will start to wake up to the facts they should have learned in basic biology class. Want to feel less tired, more aware and awake? Get some serious vitamins in you. That keeps me going ALL day long unless I spoil it by drinking a soda or some excessive sugars. I'm still whistling, singing and bouncing around at the end of the day while other people are watching the clock and waiting to go home because they feel so tired. And if anyone SHOULD start feeling tired at the end of the day, it's me... I'm in my early 40s. Feed your body right and your body will act right. Simple, simple, simple.
I'm no health nut. I eat crap all the time, but I also eat healthy stuff too and limit my soda intake a lot (and yet will drink one a day usually). But even doing a little helps a lot. Still haven't been seriously ill in over 10 years... actually more like 15 years. It just seems most people are just eating and drinking nothing but crap... even a 50/50 rate of crap to healthy food would do a lot for most people.
Really? This is new to you? What!?
Humans evolved these big brains because they paid for themselves in terms of acquisition of food calories. Now, those brains have inundated us with food calories and rather than burning them to do other useful stuff, the stupid lazy brains just sit there grinding away at the same old, pre-agricultural, power levels and yelling at the rest of our bodies "go exercise you stupid muscles!".
Hey BRAINS, if you're so smart, why don't you come up with a supercharger to ram more oxygen into those idle neurons that need firing up?
HUH?
You think technological civilization has all the intelligence it needs or something?
Seastead this.
As someone who needs to smoke to start the day I laugh at your petty addictions.. Giving up smoking is pretty hard.
For me, caffeine addiction is all about control of my body. I agree with the article that my baseline is probably the same as somebody who avoid caffeine entirely. However, I also think that a caffeine addict's lowest level of alertness is the same as an non-addict's as well.
This is interesting if you think about it, because it means that my blood's caffeine levels are a heavily-weighted component in my overall level of alertness. Assuming the floor and ceiling of my potential alertness are the same, that means that other factors (such as how much I slept last night) are less important than they are for a non-caffeine user. This gives me a finer degree of control over when I'm alert and when I'm tired, which is worth the addiction in my opinion.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
The more interesting question isn't whether caffeine gets one to above normal levels of energy but whether it can enable a user to remain at baseline for longer periods of time compared to someone not on caffeine.
No. If I remember right caffeine messes with your ATP regulation, which is a process way too important and central in metabolism to even slightly alter for more than a few hours at a time without, perhaps literally, dying. It's no surprise the human body, according to this study, simply incorporates caffeine into the baseline rather than allowing the baseline to change, and for the same reasons I don't think the duration of baseline changes, either.
I'm open to other ideas on how to combat this. In any given discussion, I swear at least a third of the posts are like this. I can't figure out why people do it. Lazyness? Self-importance? Inability to comprehend what the subject field is for?
I can't say I'm amazed by this. Very similar to alcohol, takes more and more each time to feel the same combined with feeling shitty withdrawl symptoms (insomnia, shakes, irritability, etc). Too much of anything in your system is enough for your body to want, or should I say require, it to function normally. Maybe becoming a "social" caffeine consumer is the way to go? What the hell am I talking about? That's no fun!
The definition of addiction pretty much relies on a shifting baseline. They they didn;t react different over time to the same amount there'd be no habituation and no addiction could be recognized.
So TFA can be summed up a "Caffiene addicts act as though addicted to caffiene in much the same way heroin addicts display a characteristic physiological adaptation to heroin." Therefore TFA is only news in that they found (yet again, in another way) caffiene addiction acts like an addiciton.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Sorry to disillusion you, but let me lay out the possibilities:
A. Your uncle had an incredibly, unbelievably unusual metabolism toward alcohol OR
B. He had been consistently lying about the amount of his alcohol consumption. This is extremely common behavior in alcoholics. The rest of his family supporting his story and generally being in denial is also very common.
For one week, I switched the coffee in our lab coffee club to decaf... nobody noticed. The one "proud" coffee addict even asked one day if I was making it stronger, while putting on an act of being over-stimulated.
There are ~10 people who use that machine. Seriously. Not one of them noticed they were drinking decaf for a week.
*sigh
I'm trying to figure out how this affects steam-brewed coffee like espresso machines make? The filter is usually metal rather than paper but the article linked to the wikipedia page doesn't really differentiate based on the filter.
I read once where coffee drinkers had a lower rate of suicide than non-coffee drinkers. If true, there may be more to drinking coffee that this article suggests.
So either I have to use Red Bull's oddball sugar-enriched BS for a charge (which I'll probably build up a tolerance to), or seek out alternatives like - METH (it's what's for breakfast! Yummy mmmmmeth!).
What if everything you've just described came in A ROCKET CAN?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-3qncy5Qfk
That’s true for every drug. It’s the definition of the whole thing.
It’s why they raise the dosage all the time. (Often it’s impossible to raise it fast enough to not get down to zero anyway.)
Seriously: News at 11.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Or at least they would be if there weren't so goddam many taxes on them. Cigarettes would be dirt cheap too and probably better if they weren't unpopular with white people this decade.
I yearn for some alternative universe where your cheap, delicious coffee is no longer a popular drug, and the government is making more tax money off of it than the coffee companies, and nobody is allowed to advertise coffee on TV, or put coffee-drinking scenes in movies or cartoons, and coffee cans come with warnings about heart disease plastered on the package, and all the good coffee is forced out of the market, and the only thing left is shit mass-market coffee for the extreme addicts willing to pay high prices for it.
But that won't happen any time soon because this decade, tobacco is out, and coffee is in big time.
I used to take a fat burner(which did work btw) with about 200mg caffeine per day and also geranium oil which is another stimulant. At first the energy is good but after about 2 weeks you feel you need one in the morning just to get your normal energy back. Getting off that shit cold turkey was hard for about 2 days and then after a week you're amazed how energetic you are naturally. We don't need all this caffeine that we drink. Better to stick to drinks with low or no caffeine like green/white tea & water.
Health effects of coffee
Health effects of tea
You can find more by searching at the obvious places, but needless to say, in recent years, coffee consumption (even high consumption) has been linked to health benefits. Of course, all things in moderation; I personally have one cup of coffee and one cup of tea a day, before noon (no caffeine after noon). It's more for taste and custom than anything else.
I used to only drink tea (and lots of it), which I had switched to because I used to drink so much coffee I started getting chest pains. I used to drink a *lot* of Dr. Pepper before that, but soda is probably the worst thing you can drink, besides bad moonshine or paint thinner. Seriously, the amount of sugar and other things that will leach the minerals right out of your bones in soda is criminal. Of course, getting a mocha-latte-frappe-choco-swirl from you-know-where probably isn't much better for you.
Just get yourself some whole beans, grind them right before you brew, and use a decent brewing system, and don't drink too much, and you will be better off. Or get some good tea, and make sure the water is boiling if it is black tea.
Nathan's blog
Forget coffee. Do what this guy does.
Two months ago I put an end to nearly a decade of practically continuous caffeinated beverage intake, and after feeling like the ravening undead for about two weeks-- which I spent the majority of sleeping --I'm back to feeling exactly the same as I did with the caffeine intake. Sunday I made the mistake of drinking a 2-liter of Mountain Dew, and it kept me up through Monday, wired as hell.
So, now I know two things... Constant caffeine intake basically nullifies any benefits, and the withdrawal is an absolute bitch. And now that I'm free of the constant intake, I can use caffeine occasionally like goddamn rocket fuel.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Sounds like the same old shit to me. Yet another puritan trying to prove that evil caffeine either isn't good for you or its affects are imaginary. All I can say is bullshit.
I owe my undergraduate degree to coffee. I was working either swing shift (2nd and 3rd shift depending on day) or straight graveyard (40 hour work week of all 3rd shift plus full load of classes) by my senior year. I was also drinking about 10 to 15 cups of coffee a day. I was running a continuous experiment on myself as to the affects of consuming large quantities of caffeine and, let me tell you, lack of my magic coffee (cream only; no sugar) was a sure sentence for becoming comatose and snoring.
I've heard this claim before but none of the researchers has ever explained how a boring meeting late in the day can suddenly bring on the symptoms of lack of caffeine while a good cup of joe brought to and consumed at such a meeting wards off such symptoms. Does the boredom of such a meeting somehow suck the caffeine from my body and I suddenly find myself sleepy and inattentive? And consuming the coffee only gives me a psychological lift because I believe the coffee will wake me up? Somehow, I don't think so.
I've cut my coffee consumption down to four or five cups a day of the real stuff. Still, I may end up drinking some brewed decaf late in the day because I really like the taste of coffee. I drink only decaf after about 6:00 pm because the real stuff keeps me awake if I drink it too late in the evening. This would also seem to contradict the sited study since, by its theory, my baseline caffeine consumption should keep a single cup of coffee from affecting me or it should only bring me back to baseline; not awake until 2:00 or 3:00 am (been there; done that).
Sorry but, based on personal experience, bullshit. Somebody's grant should get revoked for bogus research.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Why didn't they report the effects on the non addicts as well?
Also how much can you drink and remain un-habituated/un-addicted.
Tell me something that I don't already know. I have been trying to quick drinking coffee for over 10 years.
I'm currently suffering from withdrawal because I try to quit once again. I just don't feel like doing anything at all. But I can't sleep either.
Btw. Even if it brings you back to baseline, lack of sleep still causes anxiety, depression, memory problems, over all tiredness, general unhappiness, and many more negative side effects.
I personally think that caffeine just like loan. You just have to pay it back with interest. And longer you go, more painful it is. At some point you're in situation when all your income go to paying interest. And you start to need taking more loan to have any usable money. And naturally from that point on you have to take loan to pay interests. Hmm, sounds like many european countries and USA too.
With all due respect to your humble opinion - no.
You know how caffeine-withdrawal headaches feel like your head is about to explode? That is because your brain is being torn apart from inside.
Caffeine blocks your adenosine. So, as your body needs its adenosine, it starts pumping up adenosine production.
In couple of days you are full of adenosine, but since you are inhibiting it with all that caffeine you don't really feel it.
And then you forget to drink your coffee one morning.
As your body has probably already metabolized most of that caffeine during the night, all that extra adenosine gets to work on all them receptors and as adenosine also controls your blood pressure by expanding your blood vessels - all of them there pretty little capillaries in your noggin expand.
As an added bonus - all of your other blood vessels expand too. Now your blood pump can't get as much oxygen to where it's needed.
Plus, now your serotonin goes down and you are depressed and easily irritable.
So, if you are going to quit coffee for a while - first lock up your gun(s) and mail the key to yourself.
Using up a couple of vacation days for detox is also advisable.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
US TV shows can't resist putting in the effects of sugar on kids. And nobody ever noticed that anywhere else in the world. Maybe because IT IS NOT TRUE. Yes you can energy from sugar but the human body has plenty of sugar all the time on a normal diet. It isn't going to hyper because you add more fuel to it, you just get fatter because the body can now store fat for later instead of burning it as it should.
Clinical trials have shown that kids have no sugar rush UNLESS the parent who thinks kids get a sugar rush are present and then the kids do indeed become hyper active. So over-sensitive parents cause hyper-active children. Not sugar. (That parents infleuence the actions of they child is well known, simple experiment: put a baby who can crawl on a surface and let it crawl over a gap covered by a glass plate. The baby will have no reaction of its own to the height below it. If the mother shows delight then the baby will show it, and cross happily. If the mother shows horror, the baby will react in fear trying to determine what danger it is in. This is how we learn, how all animals with parents learn. But we can learn wrong if the input is wrong. Over-protective parents cause over-sensitive children. Yes, sometimes kids just need to walk it off and funnily enough, they do. Watch a child playing on its own. It falls, nobody panics, it continues.)
Same with coffee. Some writer probably thought it was funny and now everyone believes sitcom rules apply to the real world. Yes, cafine is different from sugar in that it is a drug and does have an effect but you need to be the kind who drinks energy drinks as if they were water, with no water. Not just a cup of coffee. Even half a dozen.
It think part of it is that people act the way they think they are supposed to act. And yes, that would be very intresting to study more because it might have a serious effect on health care. For instance the use of medication when it ain't needed. If you think you need a pill for everything, you will need a pill for everything and indeed get a pill for everything. The US is the most medicated nation on the planet and yet they aren't any healthier. What is all the non-needed drugs doing? Not just to health but to the health care costs? If media is causing people to think they have to behave in a bad way, perhaps it can be reversed as well. Less pill swallowing for every ailment in popular media content could perhaps translate to lower medicine costs?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Isn't this usually the case with similar substances? I always assumed this was how it worked.
And why did people spend money on studying this? We have known this about addictive substances for almost as long as we have even known about addictive substances.
... I would have tagged this article 'homeostasis'.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Studies have shown that people who are depressed drink more caffeine and feel less alert. And night/shift workers presumably are 'less alert and fall into the moderate/heavy caffeine users more often than dayworkers.' Therefore caffeine drinkers should be less alert than the average person once they get rid of their addiction, ruining the test. They need to select non-users at random into 2 groups and force one of the groups to become addicts and then give them the same amount as they are used to in order to get proper results.
They should conduct a similar experiment where the amphetamine snail goes on an alternating drug holiday between meth and caffeine. I can't wait for the preliminary results so I can test it on higher primates (my coding monkeys!).
And what about Java junkies? Anyone got a theory?
From Dr. Joel Fuhrman, MD:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/faq/question.aspx?sid=16&qindex=0
"""
What about Coffee?
One cup of coffee per day is not likely to cause significant risks, but the more you drink over this one cup maximum, the more likely it will interfere with your health. Research has clearly shown that excessive consumption of caffeinated beverages is dangerous. Heavy caffeine users are at higher risk of cardiac arrhythmias, which can precipitate sudden death.(1) Coffee raises blood pressure(2) and it raises both cholesterol and homocystene,(3) two risk factors for heart disease.
Besides the slightly increased risk of heart disease, there are other problems. Caffeine is a stimulant. The consumption of caffeine enables you to more comfortably get by on less sleep. Inadequate sleep promotes disease and premature aging.(4) There is no substitute for adequate sleep. Drinking coffee also boosts estrogen levels. Higher levels of estrogen worsen problems like endometriosis, breast pain and menstrual disorders. Increased estrogen levels are also linked to higher risk of breast cancer.(5)
If you are overweight, there is another compelling reason to abstain from coffee. Eliminating your caffeine intake can help you lose weight. Coffee drinkers (tea and cola users too) are drawn to eat more frequently then necessary. They eat extra meals and snacks because they mistake unpleasant caffeine withdrawal symptoms with hunger. They can't tell the difference between true hunger and the discomfort that accompanies caffeine withdrawal.
Decaffeinated coffee also has potentially harmful side effects. It has been found that drinking even moderate amounts of decaffeinated coffee can quadruple a person's risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis.(6) Researchers speculate that organic solvents in the decaf coffee might be the culprit.
In summary, coffee is most like a drug, not a food. Like most drugs it may have some minor benefits, but its toxic effects and resultant risks overwhelm those minor advantages. Caffeine is a stimulant and a healthy later life and long life is most consistently achieved when stimulants and drugs are avoided, meeting our nutritional needs, with as little exposure to toxicity as possible. [The numbers in () refer to references in the original.]
"""
He mentions elsewhere that coffee does have some health promoting antioxidants etc., but those are better obtained through a diet heavy in vegetables, fruits, beans, along with some nuts, seeds, and whole grains.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I gave up caffeine
Same here! Cold turkey from 4 big lattes per day. Unexpectedly, I now have more energy and more powers of concentration.
The problem with this study is that it's comparing self-selected groups: those who drink lots, little, and no coffee/tea. Their conclusions, drawn from comparing coffee addicts to people who don't drink coffee is a little silly. It assumes that everyone's "baseline" is the same, and ignores the well-known fact that people to take caffeine are, like people who smoke cigarettes for nicotine, often self-medicating for a neurobiological deficiency (i.e. in this case probably dopamine). To compare the levels of someone who self-medicates taken off their medication to someone who doesn't need to self-medicate is a complete load of B.S..
different chemicals have different effects
Like that super dangerous chemical dihydrogen-monoxide, which causes asphyxiation, and can be fatal in less than 3 minutes!
Two books on this theme of diminishing returns for addictions to extremes:
"The Pleasure Trap: Mastering the Hidden Force That Undermines Health & Happiness"
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Trap-Mastering-Undermines-Happiness/dp/1570671508
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose"
http://www.amazon.com/Supernormal-Stimuli-Overran-Evolutionary-Purpose/dp/039306848X
We can resensitize our taste buds in a few weeks by eating differently, as Joel Fuhrman suggests:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/
And adequate vitamin D can also help end depression that leads us to craving escape and stimulants:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
And we can change our physical infrastructure to be more life-affirming:
http://www.bluezones.com/makeover-about
Or our social infrastructure:
http://www.amazon.com/Surviving-Americas-Depression-Epidemic-Community/dp/1933392711
Or our mental infrastructure:
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
Put that knowledge all together, and put in in practice, and it is help for breaking out of some harmful feedback cycles.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
The problem with your lifestyle is that your country/people can only afford it for two generations or so. Even now the EU is having to start paring back on the vacation time, the generous pensions, the social networks, etc, because you can't afford it.
Don't be so quick to dismiss us. While I'll readily admit that we tend to demonize European socialism, we also know that your economy can't keep spending the resources necessary to maintain your lifestyle forever - you're going to have to cut back.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
allostasis. quite different.
actually a fav paper is on dynamic self assembling systems. couldnt find it in 10sec with the goog's scholar. anyway, for example a crystal is in equilibrium, and also a state of very low entropy.
this is in stark contrast to the kind of stationary states exhibited by dynamical
systems where there is a flow of entropy, and various 'breathing' modes that can (conditionally) contribute to instability or even zero eigenvalues of the jacobian of a vector valued force a function of the vector constituting the state vector. the stability of each mode (once the jacobian is diagonalised) can depend on friction or or there dissipative mechanisms, and therefore the stability and the existence of the ability to heal a self assembled system can be directly related to the dissipation and flow of entropy.
also consider; healing and adaption are opposing processes. the better you are at healing the less you are able to form adaptive callouses. and vis versa.
only thing i can link to on hand is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-assembly.
but this is a very rich and interesting field, that ranges from chaos theory to, what im trying to apply it towards; optical binding, which is where mutual forces arising from the maxwell stress tensor cause objects to dynamically self assemble into structures, where they have developed an allostasis, an adaption to the incident beam (or time harmonic planewaves).
if anyone holds an interest in dynamical systems and studying more complex behaviour;eg
the tippi-top, it flips over. this is due to a hetrocline between fixed points in the phase portrait. anyway im having trouble dealing with the excess of dimensions. how can we visualise and make sense (or even automatically process and distill) high dimensional data, eg 6n where n is the number of particles, (3position and 3velocity), sometimes you can simplify things to a plane with counter propagating beams, but still the particles can start out of the plane, anyway, with these kinds of restrictions you have 4 dimensions then by taking a poincare map (a recurrence map, also it has been published that an ideal time to use for a recurrence map is the first minimum in the entropy of the evolution of a system) the poincare map reduces this to 3 dimensions. but this is only for 2 magnetoelectric dipoles, i've been writing all my code to deal with n dipoles and arbitrary attributes to its frustrating that i feel like i need to be able to perceive 30+ dimensional spaces to progress.
perhaps its time to whip out the algebraic geometry.
Just the way people continue to get drunk (not simply reverse withdrawal) day after day without increasing their consumption people can continue to feel effects of caffeine without increasing consumption. Isn't this well studied? This conclusion is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. It's simply not true in my experience.
Hands off my Orange Pekoe and Pekoe Cut Black Tea!! OF COURSE tea keeps you alert, maybe TOO alert. Lawks. What planet are these puritans from?
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_