I have to take some issue with the numbers that were printed in the article: First of all, it mentions starbucks as being grouped in with home-brewing, etc. There have been documented studies stated that starbucks contains between 40 and 70% more caffeine than it's competitors.
Jolt: When jolt hit the market, it was supposed to have twice the caffeine as normal cola (which at the time was RC, Pepsi and Coke). Since then, Pepsi and Coke have increased their caffeine content and Mountain Dew still contains more. If you want the best effect -- Cherry Coke. Lots of caffeine and tons of sugar to keep you fuelled. The caffeine is kind of useless without the energy to utilize it.
They also didn't list excedrin which contains about 65mg caffeine. As angel_sil(?) has pointed out, it's the crutch for those seeking to wean.
I agree with you; Starbucks' coffee has, in all the literature I've seen, far more caffeine than most others (~150mg/serving compared to ~100-120).
Excedrin is, as deviathan mentioned the other day, like methodone for caffeine addicts.
I'm down to something like one can of cola a month now. I just noticed that I've been drinking a cup of the office coffee almost every day the last couple of weeks, for no good reason, and that got me wondering at the caffeine mechanism from a science standpoint. This morning, I finally got around to looking it up.
I don't drink much soda of any kind, I actually prefer water. Sometimes I'll have a sprite or cola (comes with the costco dog), but not too much beyond that. I do admit to drinking a Monster Energy Drink (which I'm sure is just as bad) on my long shift days, doubly so if I know I'm not going to have something to eat for 15+ hrs.
As for the caffeine...did you ever wonder what the hand drawn picture in my locker at school was? Caffeine Molecule.
I had been cutting back, swore I'd give it up over lent, and am now caffeine-free for five days.
1. I have better dream retention. I've remembered more dreams this week than I have in the past six months. 2. The alarm wakes me up in the morning. Normally, I sleep very soundly through Morning Edition. I've heard the 6:50 feature every morning this week. 3. I feel tired in the evening, which is a little discombulating when I'm used to staying up til 1 a.m. futzing with stuff on the internet. Last night I was up til midnight, cause my brother was in town and he and Dean always bond over beer, but that's another story. But I was tired at 10. 4. I no longer have the routine of "drink a bottle of pepsi, have to go pee RIGHT NOW DAMMIT." 5. The "thick" feeling in the morning is less and less each day. 6. I had bad headaches during the first two days of total withdrawal. I treated them with excedrine. I had a mild headache the third day that I treated with advil. No headache since.
Will keep folks updated as to whether i notice any longterm effects.
Actually... I take a great deal of exception to the article referenced. It doesn't really talk about the full gamut of what caffeine does or how it actually behaves in the body. What it does sound like is a temperance speech. Now, anyone who wants to stop ingesting caffeine, go for it. However, a little bit more about what it does and where it's actually beneficial.
The reason you get headaches when you cut way back on caffeine isn't a vascular issue, though that may be a secondary effect. It's due to how caffeine molecules bind to various and sundry receptors in the brain. So, you've got a happy little synapse sitting there, the axon does it's little pre-synaptic magic and sends a neurotransmitter to the post-synaptic bits on the dendrite. Message sent, message received, and the message gets passed up the line to do whatever it was supposed to do.
Enter caffeine. Caffeine pops through the system like a pinball and runs around binding to susceptible dendrites. When the axon sends it's single, the dendrite can't hear it through the caffeine molecule, so the axon hits it again, only harder. Once the dendrite can get the message, things are happy and wonderful again and everyone gets back to work... until caffeine wears out and then it's like that damned upstairs neighbor with the freakoid stereo and the woofer fetish. The dendrite screams and pounds on the ceiling and calls the manager until the axon finally takes it down to a reasonable level.
Now, something that caffeine does, does very well and with little fanfare that this article completely ignored is that it increases the efficacy of pain meds by about 40%. I don't know the entire range of drugs it works like this with. Something tells me it may have no impact on narcotics, but I could be completely wrong, there. However, for the aspirin, acetaminophen and naproxen range, it works *very* well. This is not just my doctor's word or the research I've done, but personal experience, here. It's why I'm *not* on any of the really nasty arthritis meds out there. I *started* drinking coffee simply for the caffeine hit (Diet Coke wasn't enough) to go with the 1000 mg of naproxen I take every day. I had been living on Excedrin for several years until it just didn't kill the pain any more.
And for some people, caffeine doesn't particularly interfere with sleep. If I'm going to pull an all-nighter, which I do from time to time, it'll help keep me alert and working, but I can sleep whenever I decide to, regardless of how much coffee I've had that evening.
Thanks for the add'l insight; I hadn't known that about the signal attenuation (or the efficacy boost).
I don't find that it interferes with my sleep, except in very large doses (something on the order of 20oz+ of energy drink (not accompanied by alcohol) after 10pm); on the other hand, aishlynn is much more sensitive to it, to the point where a soft drink at dinnertime means she won't be ready for bed until well after midnight.
Different folks do have different reactions regarding sleep.
Someone over the weekend told me that they'd seen research that linked the non-sleep impairment to ADHD. I have no idea if that's valid research or not, but it certainly would be an interesting study to read, I think.
For me, it's less about how much caffeine I get as opposed to the source of the caffeine. In college, I could drink a 2L of Jolt and head right to bed. But give me a cup of coffee and I'd be up for hours and hours. Coffee *really* gets me going and thus I rarely have more than one or two cups yearly.
Actually, Caffeine in and of itself doesn't increase the efficacy of pain meds, otherwise everything on the market for pain would have it. It's primary use is more to smooth out the "effects" as the pain medication wears off. Imagine what it'd be like if you took tylenol for your headache and it wore off completely after exactly 4 hours and 23 minutes with no taper down. Caffeine's stimulatory effects basically allow you to function despite the pain, somewhat like an endorphin.
The only controlled substances that come to mind that contain caffeine are headache medicines (Fiorinal/Fiorcet and the like). And yeah, the caffeine is there for vascular reasons (just like in Excedrin).
P.S. If you're taking 1g of Naproxen daily, you're on a nasty arthritis med. That coupled with the coffee probably isn't the best for your stomach either.
No, it's not at all nasty. Has very few side effects, none of which I've experienced and it certainly isn't Viox or any of the others that doctors resist putting patients on. As for my stomach, I rarely have problems from that sort of thing. The three to four doses of Excedrin a day for about five years would likely have done me in were my stomach all that sensitive.
As Tylenol has never touched any pain I've ever had, I wouldn't know. I do know it seems to quit pretty much at 4 hours when it's handling fever. You can almost set your watch by it. ;-)
It's primary use is more to smooth out the "effects" as the pain medication wears off.
What kind of effects are you talking about here? I know what it feels like when a pain med quits (both narcotic and non-narcotic). I also know what it feels like to take it with caffeine and without. (I've frequently been caffeine free for years at a time in my life. Cut way back to virtually nothing after getting my CPAP, cuz as one fellow-sufferer at work said, "Caffeine's now an option, not a necessity." :-)
What you're saying simply doesn't jibe with both my research and my experience. Can you point me to some resources? If I've misunderstood something I've read or been told, I want to know.
Naproxen has just as long a side effect list as pretty much any non-selective NSAID on the market (Ibuprofen, Naproxen, Diclofenac, Indomethacin, etc). The key thing to remember with NSAIDs is that everyone responds differently to each one, so they have to keep jumping around until they find one that works with relatively few side effects and stick with it.
Just for the record, Naproxen doesn't do anything for me except give me a stomachache. Ibuprofen works better for me (though at higher doses, it makes me a bit tired).
If you're taking Naproxen for arthritis, then of course Tylenol isn't going to do anything -- it's not an anti-inflammatory. But if you were taking Excedrin that many times a day for that long, you were getting a healthy dose of Tylenol the whole time (Excedrin = Tylenol, Aspirin, Caffeine).
As for pain, Caffeine simply does *not* potentiate pain medication. If that were the case, every pain management clinic would be prescribing everyone to have a regular regimen of caffeine. For that matter, the drug companies would be scrambling themselves silly to make new combination drugs with caffeine.
Keep this in mind -- pain medications by their mechanism of action tend to be depressants, some more so than others. Caffeine tends to be a stimulant. Simply being stimulated to be awake (and preferably ambulatory) goes a long way to explaining to your body that it's really not hurting all that badly (kind of like endorphins).
As for Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra, they were great drugs with fantastic feedback. The problem was that doctors were prescribing them for non-indicated uses indiscriminantly. The only indication they had was for short-term use in rheumatoid or osteoarthritis and only if they had known stomach sensitivity. That's it. Period. 99% of the people that had problems with it either didn't have rheumatoid/osteoarthritis or a stomach sensitivity and never should have been placed on it in the first place. A large number of the people that did qualify used it for far longer than the few weeks it was intended for (in some cases 5+ years).
If you're taking Naproxen for arthritis, then of course Tylenol isn't going to do anything
I meant even before the arthritis. Never did squat for headaches or anything else. I was always floored when someone would offer me some for a headache. "That? Are you kidding? Where's the aspirin?" I spent a long time right after I first encountered it in my teens wondering how they got away with lying about Tylenol being a pain killer.
As for Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra
That's not what I've read. Nor is it what my doctor warned me about when she first diagnosed my arthritis. She'd read the research and evaluated the results and was far from happy with what she saw. She warned me about getting into those long before Vioxx was pulled off the market.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninetydegrees
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
AAAAAAAAHHH TOO MUCH COFFEEEEE!
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
Jolt: When jolt hit the market, it was supposed to have twice the caffeine as normal cola (which at the time was RC, Pepsi and Coke). Since then, Pepsi and Coke have increased their caffeine content and Mountain Dew still contains more. If you want the best effect -- Cherry Coke. Lots of caffeine and tons of sugar to keep you fuelled. The caffeine is kind of useless without the energy to utilize it.
They also didn't list excedrin which contains about 65mg caffeine. As angel_sil(?) has pointed out, it's the crutch for those seeking to wean.
(no subject)
Excedrin is, as
I'm down to something like one can of cola a month now. I just noticed that I've been drinking a cup of the office coffee almost every day the last couple of weeks, for no good reason, and that got me wondering at the caffeine mechanism from a science standpoint. This morning, I finally got around to looking it up.
(no subject)
I don't drink much soda of any kind, I actually prefer water. Sometimes I'll have a sprite or cola (comes with the costco dog), but not too much beyond that. I do admit to drinking a Monster Energy Drink (which I'm sure is just as bad) on my long shift days, doubly so if I know I'm not going to have something to eat for 15+ hrs.
As for the caffeine...did you ever wonder what the hand drawn picture in my locker at school was? Caffeine Molecule.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
1. I have better dream retention. I've remembered more dreams this week than I have in the past six months.
2. The alarm wakes me up in the morning. Normally, I sleep very soundly through Morning Edition. I've heard the 6:50 feature every morning this week.
3. I feel tired in the evening, which is a little discombulating when I'm used to staying up til 1 a.m. futzing with stuff on the internet. Last night I was up til midnight, cause my brother was in town and he and Dean always bond over beer, but that's another story. But I was tired at 10.
4. I no longer have the routine of "drink a bottle of pepsi, have to go pee RIGHT NOW DAMMIT."
5. The "thick" feeling in the morning is less and less each day.
6. I had bad headaches during the first two days of total withdrawal. I treated them with excedrine. I had a mild headache the third day that I treated with advil. No headache since.
Will keep folks updated as to whether i notice any longterm effects.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
The reason you get headaches when you cut way back on caffeine isn't a vascular issue, though that may be a secondary effect. It's due to how caffeine molecules bind to various and sundry receptors in the brain. So, you've got a happy little synapse sitting there, the axon does it's little pre-synaptic magic and sends a neurotransmitter to the post-synaptic bits on the dendrite. Message sent, message received, and the message gets passed up the line to do whatever it was supposed to do.
Enter caffeine. Caffeine pops through the system like a pinball and runs around binding to susceptible dendrites. When the axon sends it's single, the dendrite can't hear it through the caffeine molecule, so the axon hits it again, only harder. Once the dendrite can get the message, things are happy and wonderful again and everyone gets back to work... until caffeine wears out and then it's like that damned upstairs neighbor with the freakoid stereo and the woofer fetish. The dendrite screams and pounds on the ceiling and calls the manager until the axon finally takes it down to a reasonable level.
Now, something that caffeine does, does very well and with little fanfare that this article completely ignored is that it increases the efficacy of pain meds by about 40%. I don't know the entire range of drugs it works like this with. Something tells me it may have no impact on narcotics, but I could be completely wrong, there. However, for the aspirin, acetaminophen and naproxen range, it works *very* well. This is not just my doctor's word or the research I've done, but personal experience, here. It's why I'm *not* on any of the really nasty arthritis meds out there. I *started* drinking coffee simply for the caffeine hit (Diet Coke wasn't enough) to go with the 1000 mg of naproxen I take every day. I had been living on Excedrin for several years until it just didn't kill the pain any more.
And for some people, caffeine doesn't particularly interfere with sleep. If I'm going to pull an all-nighter, which I do from time to time, it'll help keep me alert and working, but I can sleep whenever I decide to, regardless of how much coffee I've had that evening.
(no subject)
I don't find that it interferes with my sleep, except in very large doses (something on the order of 20oz+ of energy drink (not accompanied by alcohol) after 10pm); on the other hand,
(no subject)
Someone over the weekend told me that they'd seen research that linked the non-sleep impairment to ADHD. I have no idea if that's valid research or not, but it certainly would be an interesting study to read, I think.
(no subject)
(no subject)
The only controlled substances that come to mind that contain caffeine are headache medicines (Fiorinal/Fiorcet and the like). And yeah, the caffeine is there for vascular reasons (just like in Excedrin).
P.S. If you're taking 1g of Naproxen daily, you're on a nasty arthritis med. That coupled with the coffee probably isn't the best for your stomach either.
(no subject)
As Tylenol has never touched any pain I've ever had, I wouldn't know. I do know it seems to quit pretty much at 4 hours when it's handling fever. You can almost set your watch by it. ;-)
It's primary use is more to smooth out the "effects" as the pain medication wears off.
What kind of effects are you talking about here? I know what it feels like when a pain med quits (both narcotic and non-narcotic). I also know what it feels like to take it with caffeine and without. (I've frequently been caffeine free for years at a time in my life. Cut way back to virtually nothing after getting my CPAP, cuz as one fellow-sufferer at work said, "Caffeine's now an option, not a necessity." :-)
What you're saying simply doesn't jibe with both my research and my experience. Can you point me to some resources? If I've misunderstood something I've read or been told, I want to know.
(no subject)
Just for the record, Naproxen doesn't do anything for me except give me a stomachache. Ibuprofen works better for me (though at higher doses, it makes me a bit tired).
If you're taking Naproxen for arthritis, then of course Tylenol isn't going to do anything -- it's not an anti-inflammatory. But if you were taking Excedrin that many times a day for that long, you were getting a healthy dose of Tylenol the whole time (Excedrin = Tylenol, Aspirin, Caffeine).
As for pain, Caffeine simply does *not* potentiate pain medication. If that were the case, every pain management clinic would be prescribing everyone to have a regular regimen of caffeine. For that matter, the drug companies would be scrambling themselves silly to make new combination drugs with caffeine.
Keep this in mind -- pain medications by their mechanism of action tend to be depressants, some more so than others. Caffeine tends to be a stimulant. Simply being stimulated to be awake (and preferably ambulatory) goes a long way to explaining to your body that it's really not hurting all that badly (kind of like endorphins).
As for Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra, they were great drugs with fantastic feedback. The problem was that doctors were prescribing them for non-indicated uses indiscriminantly. The only indication they had was for short-term use in rheumatoid or osteoarthritis and only if they had known stomach sensitivity. That's it. Period. 99% of the people that had problems with it either didn't have rheumatoid/osteoarthritis or a stomach sensitivity and never should have been placed on it in the first place. A large number of the people that did qualify used it for far longer than the few weeks it was intended for (in some cases 5+ years).
(no subject)
I meant even before the arthritis. Never did squat for headaches or anything else. I was always floored when someone would offer me some for a headache. "That? Are you kidding? Where's the aspirin?" I spent a long time right after I first encountered it in my teens wondering how they got away with lying about Tylenol being a pain killer.
As for Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra
That's not what I've read. Nor is it what my doctor warned me about when she first diagnosed my arthritis. She'd read the research and evaluated the results and was far from happy with what she saw. She warned me about getting into those long before Vioxx was pulled off the market.