The Highs and Lows of Caffeine Addiction

Do you wake to thoughts of that first steaming cup of coffee or tea and until you get it, you haven?t truly woken up? Or maybe throughout the day you crave a can of soda for a quick boost of energy, and until you get it, you feel tired and irritable. Some researchers have estimated that Americans as a whole consume 45 million pounds of caffeine every year (Schreiber et al., Measurement of coffee and caffeine intake: implications for epidemiologic research, Preventive Medicine, 17:280-294, 1988 and Chou, T., Wake up and smell the coffee. Caffeine, coffee and the medical consequences, West. J. Med., 157:544-553, 1992). Yet, there have been recent outbursts in the medical community claiming that caffeine has addictive qualities. Should Americans be worried about the content of the comfort drinks they consume?

If it?s true that caffeine is addictive, what defines one as a caffeine addict? We all enjoy the occasional caffeinated beverage.  How much caffeine does one have to consume in order to become addicted? Those are matters up for scientific debate. Some doctors claim that regular use of caffeine can lead to addiction, others that regular caffeine use, such as the amounts found in two or three cups of coffee a day, isn?t anything to worry about. Rather they claim that caffeine from various elicit drugs, such as cocaine, behaves differently. That is the sort of caffeine that can become addictive. Yet, nobody seems to have definitive proof that silences the other voice. The debate continues to rage.

If you?re worried about too much caffeine in your diet, and you?d like to cut down, the best thing to do is not to cut it out entirely, cold turkey, but to decrease it gradually. Instead of drinking four cups of a coffee a day, try three for a little bit, then decrease it to two until, if you want to cut caffeine entirely out of your diet, you work your way down to nothing, or stopping to what you feel is a comfortable level. This way, your body won?t experience the withdrawal symptoms associated with caffeine such as headaches and irritability.

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