Caffeine is Not Your Friend
November 2012
Someone: For most of my adult life, I drank coffee because I suffered from periods of fatigue. Recently I discovered that coffee was the cause. I have stopped drinking it and no longer need to take naps. Caffeine may not affect you negatively but I am posting this review just in case it does.
A Book by Stephen Cherniske
(Reviewer is anonymous)
http://www.relfe.com/caffeine.html
Okay, I know this article won’t be popular. Most of us are so addicted to caffeine that we don’t want to know about it. I am writing this because when “Caffeine Blues” came out I just knew I had to read it.
Several years ago I realized that coffee was much worse than we had been told, because I noticed that I got an arthritic pain in my wrist within ten to twenty minutes of a cappuccino!
This book didn’t just tell me how bad coffee was – it told me how GOOD I would feel once I was totally caffeine free for two months.For example, I no longer have the drained feeling that I sometimes used to get in the mornings.
Written by Stephen Cherniske, a Clinical Nutritionist, “Caffeine Blues” is incredibly easy to read, and convincing. I realized that caffeine does NOT give us energy. In fact, it is a major CAUSE of LACK of energy.
As Cherniske waded through the tons of information on caffeine, he began to see that consciously or unconsciously nearly every researcher starts from the assumption that caffeine is okay. Why? Probably because they themselves depend on caffeine.
Caffeine is in coffee, black tea, green tea, oolong tea (wu-yi tea), ‘decaffeinated’ coffee and tea, chocolate, colas, chuppa-chups, many sodas, some drugs, most ‘energy’ drinks and guarana.
A 6 oz cup of:
- Percolated coffee has about 120 mg of caffeine
- Black tea has about 70 mg of caffeine
- Green tea about 35 mg of caffeine
- Leading colas 45 mg of caffeine
- Mountain dew 54 mg of caffeine
- Brewed decaf has 5 mg of caffeine
- Milk chocolate has 6 mg per ounce
- Baking chocolate has 35 mg per ounce.
Caffeine is produced by more than eighty species of plants. The reason may well be survival. As it turns out, caffeine is used by plants as a pesticide.
Caffeine is considered harmless simply because it is so widely used. Dr William Dement in his book “The Promise of Sleep” said that if caffeine was introduced today, it would not be allowed.
CAFFEINE LOBBY
There is a brochure available in hospitals and other medical related areas: “What you should know about caffeine” published by the International Food Information Council (IFIC) in Washington DC. After many phone calls Cherniske finally got a list of ‘supporters’ of the IFIC. It included Pepsi, Coca-Cola, M&M, Nutrasweet, Nestle and Hershey – all of whom have caffeine in their drinks and foods.
‘Partners’ of the IFIC included groups such as the National Association of Pediatric Nurses and the Children’s Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureau Inc. This brochure says that “Caffeine is normally excreted within several hours after consumption”. In fact, only 1% is excreted. The remaining 99% has to be detoxified by the liver. I t can take up to 12 hours to detoxify a single cup of coffee.
Many studies regarding coffee and hypertension were flawed, because the test subjects came off coffee for only one or two weeks. It takes many more weeks than this for stress hormone levels of the body to return to normal.
The ‘half-life’ of a drug is the time it takes the body to remove one half of the dose. Caffeine is a drug. The half-life of a single dose of caffeine ranges from three to TWELVE hours.
CAFFEINE = STRESS, NOT ENERGY
Caffeine puts your body into stress. A single 250 milligram dose of caffeine (the equivalent of about 2.5 six ounce cups of coffee) has been shown to increase levels of the stress hormone epinephrine (adrenaline) by over 200%.
Caffeine triggers a classic fight-or-flight reaction designed for events that happened only occasionally (such as a lion chasing you). Now, we put our body in fight-or-flight mode every day with caffeine!!! As a result, sugar and fat get dumped unused in the bloodstream. The sugar creates more stress. The fat clogs the arteries. The digestive system slows or shuts down.
Not only is caffeine addictive, it also encourages addictions to substances like nicotine.
Caffeine does not give you energy. It stimulates your nervous system and adrenals. That’s not energy, that’s stress. The ‘energy’ that you think you get from caffeine is really just a loan from the adrenals and liver, and the interest you have to pay is very high.
Stress is a major factor in disorders such as anxiety, insomnia, depression, ulcers, rheumatoid arthritis, headache, hypoglycemia, asthma, herpes, hypertension and heart disease. And yet hospitals provide coffee and tea, which put your body into stress!!!
Caffeine consumption leads to DHEA deficiency .DHEA is our vitality hormone. Decreased levels of DHEA is a cause of aging. Caffeine is an AGING DRUG!
SIDE EFFECTS
Caffeine is implicated in ulcers and irritable bowel syndrome: GABA is produced in the intestinal tract, where it calms anxiety and stress. Caffeine disrupts the normal metabolism of GABA.
Caffeine is also a diuretic which is something that causes urination, which often leads to dehydration. Drinking a single cup of coffee causes one to urinate 1.5 cups of fluid.
Caffeine disrupts sleep. Deep sleep is CRITICAL to good health. When there’s caffeine in your bloodstream, you are unlikely to experience any deep sleep at all!
Caffeine AT ANY TIME of the day can cause sleep problems, especially if you are under stress.
Malnutrition is one of the most well-defined effects of habitual caffeine intake.
A single cup of coffee can reduce iron absorption from a meal by as much as 75%.
People do not develop a tolerance to the anxiety-producing effects of caffeine. Rather, people simply become accustomed to the feelings of stress, irritability and aggressiveness produced by the drug.
Caffeine contributes to depression in well-defined ways. This is particularly due to the withdrawal effect, which can cause headache, depression and fatigue, even in light users (p. 111).
Cherniske reported that 90% of people who came to him who suffered from depression and gave up caffeine completely for 2 months reported that their depression went away!
See How a Caffeinated Spider Spins a Web!
Students the world over use caffeine not only to stay awake, but also they believe the drug will improve their performance on exams. Solid research, however, illustrates that as little as 100 milligrams of caffeine (one cup of coffee, two cups of cola) can cause a significant DECREASE in recall and reasoning.
Moderate coffee drinkers with high cholesterol had more than seven times the risk of heart attack, while heavy coffee drinkers had eighteen times the risk of non-coffee drinkers!
Caffeine depletes your supplies of thiamin and other B vitamins, calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron and zinc. Caffeine increases calcium loss and risk of osteoporosis.
Take the Challenge! Most people have no idea what life would be like without the background of caffeine and stress hormones coursing through their veins.
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‘Caffeine Can Cause Hallucinations’
Editor’s Note: This is more evidence that caffeine is much worse than most people realise.
January 14, 2009
Double-shot lovers take note—the world’s most popular psychoactive drug may have a disturbing hidden effect on some of its habitual users.
Heavy drinkers of coffee, tea, energy drinks, and other caffeinated beverages are more likely to hallucinate, hear imaginary voices, and even sense the presence of deceased people, a new study suggests.
Among the 200 test subjects, those who consumed the equivalent of seven cups of coffee a day were found to be three times more likely to have hallucinatory experiences than those who consumed less than a single cup a day.
Lead author Simon Jones, a psychology Ph.D. student at Durham University in the U.K, is intrigued but cautious about the connection.
“This hasn’t shown that caffeine causes hallucinations, though the data are consistent with that idea,” he said.
“It could also be that people who have hallucinations are more anxious and worried, so that causes them to consume more caffeine.”
Ref: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/01/090114-caffeine-hallucinations.html
*** The mother of a reader went blind from a stroke. Please remember that caffeine is a major cause of stroke.
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