Can Caffeine Hurt You

Most people who crave that extra mug of coffee, tea or cola drink to pep up a slow day know that each swallow contains caffeine but few realize how potent a drug it is. Caffeine, sometimes found with chemically related stimulants known as theophylline and theobromine, is a drug that acts fast. In less than five minutes after you've downed that cup of coffee, caffeine has raced to every part of your body. It increases the flow of urine and stomach acid, relaxes involuntary muscles, steps up the intake of oxygen, and speeds up the basal metabolic rate by 10 percent. It also hightens the pumping strength of the heart, but too much caffeine can lead to an irregular heartbeat. Caffeine improves the user's physical coordination, for example, it improves the skills of typists and motorists. But it can also hinder your efforts. It can make a painstaking task, which needs a steady hand and accurate timing, more difficult.

Can caffeine hurt you? While cramming for final exams, you may stay up all night, and find looking nervously at the sunrise, that your seventh cup of coffee has left you with quivering hands and a grinding headache. No wonder. For most of us, three to four cups of coffee, arround 400 milligrams of caffeine, can bring on irritableness, headaches, tremors, and nervousness. If that dose is doubled, the jittery coffee drinker can suffer hallucinations, perhaps convulsions. The fatal dise is 10 grams (or 10,000 milligrams). But to die from a caffeine overdose, you'd need to polish off 67 to 100 cups in a brief sitting. Luckily, our bodies metabolize this drug rapidly little trace in the blood stream by evening.

Caffeine can create dependency. Those who drink at least five cups of coffee a day can suffer several days of withdrawal symptoms, including nausea, headaches, irritability, and lassitude, if they kick the habit. The person who drinks too much in a big way can experience "caffeinism," a syndrome characteristized by rapid breathing, agitation, mood changes, and heart palpitations. Caffeine may pose other dangers. Although no proof has been found, studies have linked the drug in cola drinks and coffee to heart diseases, benign and malignant tumors, pancreatic cancer and birth defects. It's good idea for pregnant women to avoid caffeine as they would avoid any other drug.

Recently, researchers have expressed concern over children who get the caffeine habit. After all, even one cola drink gives an eight years old a hefty jolt of this drug, and many children consume much more than this every day.