Effects Of Caffeine Addiction Essay

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Scrutiny of caffeine and its effects has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, due in part to an increase in consumption of caffeine. In fact, coffee consumption among young adults rose to 3.2 cups per day in 2008 from 2.4 cups per day in 2005 (Rokerya 1). For instance, in a one hour period, on Richland College’s on-campus Starbucks, the author took note of how many customers arrived and purchased a cup of coffee. Between 8:00 and 9:00 AM, there were 51 customers, implying that – especially at college - many people are dependent on coffee in the mornings. However, the results from these studies are inconclusive and often somewhat contradictory – many studies (such as that by Tetsuya Ohara et al.) show that caffeine is a great boon to …show more content…

As mentioned earlier, relying on caffeine to wake you up and keep you that way reduces your body’s ability to do that itself. The problem, one might argue, is not necessarily the coffee, but the school giving the student so much work that they have to stay up late enough to rely on coffee to keep themselves awake, or the teen’s lack of self-regulation staying up late doing pointless activities such as playing video games. And that one would have a point, except that we aren’t here to argue for educational reform or about “darn kids” and their video games. Those things are the source of the problem, but caffeine is a symptom that perpetuates itself and many other problematic symptoms. Even without school or video games, the problems associated with caffeine still …show more content…

Caffeine has been linked to a number of birth defects – most notably low birth weight, as “pregnant women have slower caffeine metabolism, with 1.5 to 3.5 times longer half-life needed to eliminate caffeine, compared to non-pregnant woman” (Rhee et al. ___ ). Furthermore, because infants’ livers are less developed than those of their mothers’, they are at a much higher risk of caffeine poisoning and related effects (such as low birth weight) – “recently, Greenwood et al found that consuming an increment of 100 mg/day of caffeine was associated with a 7% increase in the risk of LBW” (Rhee et al. 2). Similar reasoning applies to newborns, who still share a link to their mothers through breastfeeding – a method by which a significant amount of caffeine can be

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