DailyDirt: This Is Your Brain On Caffeine. Any Questions?
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Making the perfect cup of coffee is an experiment that’s been studied for decades — if not for hundreds of years since coffee was first brewed in the 1300s. It’s not an exact science yet, but studies on coffee drinking seem to point to it being mostly beneficial. Here are just a few interesting links for coffee lovers out there.
- According to one study, you’re probably drinking too much coffee if you consume more than 28 cups per week. But if you’re over 55, it apparently doesn’t matter much to your health if you’re drinking more than that amount of coffee. So if you’re younger than 55 and drinking more than 4 cups every day, you just need to live a little longer and you can drink as much as you want. In fact, some other studies say coffee can lower the risk of premature death. [url]
- If you think that decaffeinated coffee is free of caffeine, think again. Decaf just has lower amounts of caffeine — 3 to 15 milligrams per cup versus 85 milligrams (or more) for regular coffee. Those milligrams can add up if you’re drinking a lot of decaf coffee. [url]
- Conventional wisdom says that pregnant women shouldn’t drink coffee (or drink alcohol or eat sushi), but maybe the risks of doing so aren’t that high? Better safe than sorry, though, right? [url]
- Even though people have been drinking coffee for centuries, the effect of coffee on our health isn’t really clear. Caffeine might not be the only active ingredient in coffee, and studies haven’t always separated out the smokers who seem to drink a lot of coffee. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: caffeine, coffee, decaf, decaffeinated coffee, drinks, drugs, food, health, medicine, pregnant
Comments on “DailyDirt: This Is Your Brain On Caffeine. Any Questions?”
Coffee doesn’t lower the rate of premature death, it just makes you keep moving longer after your death.
To quote Freddy Kruger: “Yeah! What are you on?”
But all this does is reenforce my decision not to drink coffee.
It should also be worth mentioning the possible preventative qualities it contains against Parkinson’s Disease.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20410106
Are Drugs Bad?
Caffeine is a drug. Ethanol is a drug. Nicotine is a drug. Cannabis is a drug.
Want a more precise term than ?drug?? How about ?psychoactive substance??
Some people don?t like the thought of imbibing drugs for pleasure. A lot of these same people don?t like to see ethanol and nicotine lumped in with other drugs.
Also I?ve seen repeated studies try to find something bad about caffeine?even trying to link it with cancer. So far, none of the charges have stuck.
Re: Are Drugs Bad?
I would call it a chemical compound, is it bad?
Could be, it depends on a lot of things, like genetic makeup of the subject exposed to it, mean of exposure(oral, nasal, injected, absorbed, etc), dose, lenght of exposure, production of the substance that may not be entirely pure and may have contaminants(e.g. Ontario Minamata disease, which used the Castner?Kellner process which is a mercury cell that despite recycling the mercury still contaminates the products and by-products of the process.
Now it is a grave threat to humans?
I don’t think so, is not like caffeine is produced with dangerous chemicals that can contaminate it, and people have been using it for almost a thousand years without mass dying or severe consequences, different from heavy metals like lead that was used by VIP’s in antiguity for cosmectics or mercury that a Chinese imperor drank to be immortal or something and died.
But I am glad that we are almost at the point where sensors for almost everything are just around the corner, than we will be to create huge databases of information to see what is what, if governments don’t screw it up, I don’t know how they will do it, but I am certain someone somewhere will find a way to use this to screw others and it will be a threat to privacy, then we will need rules to guide us to how we collect and interact with such data, data that we need to keep us safe but that it can also be misused.
But I digress, when I encounter a chemical, I look at what it does, its toxicity, how it is produced and how it could interact with others chemicals, this information is not easy to come by though, I would love to see a public database of all known chemical reactions where I could just type the inCh, SMILE or popular name and see what it happens.
It took me months to realize that gases from burning biomass can be turned into gypsum and other useful substances so that toxic “sulfur” would be transformed into something inert, still this is just the tip of an iceberg.
Imagine using Hydrogen sulfide as a precursor for another substance or substances. That smelly gas can be used to produce elemental sulfur and hydrogen or be transformed into another substance that uses hydrogen and sulfur.
Can you imagine when you can take samples from your air, water and see the substances that are in it, and query a database about possible chem reactions? which can be influenced by temperature, PH, pressure and some other factors, and you can transform “toxic” elements into useful things for yourself?
This is one initiative trying to sense the enviroment we live in.
http://publiclab.org/
That is the time when we transform ourselves as a group from parasites to a symbiotic relationship with our environment I believe.
caffeine factoid...
caffeine has a lower LD50 than cocaine…
(ie is MORE ‘deadly’)
just sayin’…
Re: caffeine factoid...
You hit the chemical databases online didn’t you?
Here for your entertainment, see the funny named compounds that exist from Arsole to Draculin
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm
Check with the IUPAC, CAS number, ATC Code, PubChem, DrugBank, ChemSpider, UNII, KEGG, ChEBI or ChEMBL databases
You learn more factoids about the compounds you are looking for.
Re: caffeine factoid...
Ummm…. That’s not right at all about the caffeine LD50.
So LD50 in mice for Caffeine is 192 mg/Kg(when ingested orally) in rats.(Just wait for it.) In humans LD50 is considered 150-200 mg/Kg depending on sensitivities and what not. So we take an average human(180 lbs, convert to Kilograms 180/2.2 = 81.81repeating. Take that number and multily by the mean of the LD50(I say is 175 mg/Kg) = 14.318repeating Grams is the LD50.
For cocaine it is roughly guessimated(All sites never broke past 1.5G so I decided to use this number) to be 1.2-1.5 Grams for a human. So in other words cocaine is a significant figure more lethal than cocaine.
So instead we’ll use a different method. We can assume that a ratio of LD50s when compared to in Rats will produce a ratio that should represent the approximate ratio in humans.
Therefore the LD50 of caffeine for rats is 260 mg/Kg(Injected into cavern) and for cocaine it is 92mg/Kg(Injected into cavern.) This produces an approximate ratio of cocaine being 3 times more lethal than caffeine, which is supported above.
http://www.erowid.org/psychoactives/health/psychoactives_ld50s.shtml
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/813959-overview
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine
Re: Re: caffeine factoid...
Here some more resources for ya.
Cocaine:
https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/summary/summary.cgi?cid=5760
https://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.10194104
Synonyms:
methylbenzoylecgonine, benzoylmethylecgonine, ecgonine methyl ester benzoate, 2b-Carbomethoxy −3b-benzoyloxy tropane
SMILES
CN1[C@H]2CC[C@@H]1C@@HC@@HC2
InChI
InChI=1S/C17H21NO4/c1-18-12-8-9-13(18)15(17(20)21-2)14(10-12)22-16(19)11-6-4-3-5-7-11/h3-7,12-15H,8-10H2,1-2H3/t12-,13+,14-,15+/m0/s1
Key:ZPUCINDJVBIVPJ-LJISPDSOSA-N
Re: Re: Re: caffeine factoid...
This is to say, which one of the Cocaine compounds you are talking about, and which one is she talking about?
Re: Re: caffeine factoid...
INCHEM: Cocaine – 7.2 Toxicity
http://web4health.info/en/answers/add-cocaine-overdose.htm
Oh no! We’re all gonna die!
Wait a minute…we ARE all gonna die!
Of all the ways
To die, I’d take caffeine and cigarettes over any CII drug.
True, they’re all addicting, but I’ve never seen anyone held up by a crazed caffeine addict saying:
“Your coffee cup or your life.”
Re: Of all the ways
youve never seen me in the morning
Re: Of all the ways
just wait ’til the politicians decide to outlaw coffee and nicotine in order to save us from ourselves(you see this happening already with the nicotine in certain places). then you may actually see this scenario you describe. undoubtedly that cup of coffee or pack of smokes you’re being held up for would be worth multiples more in the black-market dynamic.
Retina damage
Folks, drinking more than 3 cups per days increases the risk of damage to your retinas. Google it…
Re: Retina damage
while you’re at it, google the aspartame, saccharin, and fluoride found in various products deemed ‘safe’ by our all-knowing FDA. /sarc
Even though people have been drinking coffee for centuries, the effect of coffee on our health isn’t really clear
Is there really a need to address century-old food consumption habits? Isn’t the problem the overindustrialization of food to begin with? I take those studies with a ton of salt, not a grain. Really. Specially when they address food that’s been around for ages.
Re: Re:
We were hardwired to consume as much as we could and it was not so long ago that this abundance started, less than a hundred years so maybe is just time, we haven’t had time to adapt to this new way.
Which I believe is a bit suicidal, any organism that adapts itself to great amounts of resources may fail in the long run.
So all those illness caused by over consumption of food like diabetes type II are not necessary a bad thing, they are a warning from our biological systems to stop munching so much and those who don’t pay attention will die.
I think over production is a symptom of over consumption.
As the old saying goes, the poison is in the quantity.
In this case the quantity you consume.
Actually, I am glad that this post gives me a wavering thumbs up to continue with my coffee-drinking…and for those who are on a crusade to rid the world of the evils of caffeine, kindly sail away to the mythical Land of Killjoys and leave the rest of us to it 🙂