Consequences of Caffeine

 Every morning people wake up to a nice and hot cup of coffee, including me, and every morning I am reminded of 17 years ago, when I would sit on my great-grandfather’s lap sipping his coffee and dunking delicious vanilla wafers in his coffee. With school in full swing, it seems that after each passing day it gets a little harder to wake up, so we all drink coffee. But why? Why has coffee become the go-to picker-upper in the mornings? Obviously this is a rhetorical question because everybody knows that the one ingredient, the one “miracle-worker” for the morning blues, is caffeine.

An article by Discovery Fit and Health adequately describes the mechanical process of how caffeine keeps you awake. In short, caffeine tricks the brain into accepting it by looking and acting like another molecule, adenosine. A natural build up in adenosine leads to drowsiness, but caffeine fools the brain into accepting it instead of adenosine, slowing down the brains reaction to sleepiness. Sounds complicated! What I found interesting about this was the process of “tricking” the brain. To me, fooling your body into thinking something else doesn’t seem natural, and as my gut told me, it truly is unnatural.

Initially, coffee was identified with adults because young children seem to already have enough energy to go around. But with the advent of more “exotic” or “special” types of coffee produced by corporate chains, caffeine has been spreading to younger and younger people. In a recent study by the Swiss National Science Foundation some possible side effects of caffeine for young adults have been identified. The study was based on the fact that, in both humans and rats, the greatest maturation of the brain occurs during childhood and is highest during puberty. Thus the group studied the effects of caffeine on rats during their growth period. In conclusion, they found that the rats that were given caffeine begin a deep sleep period, which is characteristic of puberty, much later than the control group (given water). Overall, the addition of caffeine to the diet of the rats during their pubescent period greatly delayed the development of their brains. The caffeine that is supposed to wake you up actually slowed the growth period down, not good!

 Now rats are far from human, so don’t freak out! I mean we have all heard the comparison, “are you a man or a mouse?” Although on the other hand, rats do have several biological similarities to humans, so there is slight cause to be worried. They may be small and they may be less developed, but their biological processes and organs all have several similarities. Take what you will out of the information; caffeine has NOT been proven to be absolutely harmful to humans, yet. And so I and every other dreary individual will continue the morning routine, summing it up with a steaming cup of coffee, for now.

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My name is Charlie, and I am a senior at Detroit Country Day. I play Football and Hockey and I am a world record holding Powerlifter.