Lukas van de Coevering | Caffeine is drugs, should we use it at all?
Coffee: nearly everyone sometimes drinks a cup (or two, or more). But how good is the caffeine provided for you, our columnist Lukas wonders. “On average, 5 hours after you’ve consumed caffeine, half of it is still in your body.”
Riddle me this: which drug do university students take the most? Is it marijuana? Maybe ritalin? Alcohol? None of these are it. The answer is something so familiar it doesn’t even come to mind. It’s caffeine, of course! Every break, there’s a queue at the coffee machine. Before any exam, every other student has an energy drink in their hand. It’s no surprise, as 80% of people worldwide consume caffeine daily. It is the most widely used psychoactive stimulant there is.
But wait, let’s take a step back. What kind of a silly riddle is that? And how the hell can a morning coffee be considered a drug?
Well, firstly, it’s a Dutch riddle, the kind that gets straight to the point. To answer the more important question, though, caffeine is a drug because it is psychoactive and stimulates the central nervous system, albeit in a milder way than most other substances. It’s also addictive, as is quite apparent.
So we (almost) all drink it every day, and many of us even rely on it to function properly. It’s even technically a drug! That poses an interesting question: is caffeine good for us or not?
Healthy?
Well, the answer to that is complex. First of all, the forms of caffeine vary widely. Coffee is a drink with naturally occurring caffeine. But it’s much more than just that. It contains a large amount of antioxidants and polyphenols, the things that make berries and olive oil healthy. In a way, drinking coffee is like eating your vegetables! There’s extensive science to prove it: one highly cited meta-analysis showed that coffee drinking is associated with a reduction in cardiovascular disease and cancer risk.
On the other hand, an energy drink only has caffeine, a few added vitamins, and either a lot of sugar or artificial sweeteners. This would not have the same positive effect as coffee. It’s a soft drink with extra caffeine. So choose your source carefully and stick to the OG: coffee.
How about the caffeine itself, good or bad? Well, that depends on who you are and how you use it. As you may know, it has a tendency to keep you up, something achieved by blocking the receptors in your brain that receive the signals that make you sleepy. Additionally, on average, 5 hours after you’ve consumed caffeine, half of it is still in your body. That means that if you have a cup of coffee at 16:00, by 21:00, you still have half a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine in your system. It also means that the more caffeine you have throughout the day, the longer you have to wait before it leaves your system.
As anyone who’s gone a few days without a good night’s rest knows, sleep is one of the most critical factors for health and daily function. Thus, drinking 3+ cups of coffee worth of caffeine, especially later in the day, will likely negatively affect your sleep and potentially your health.
However, too early isn’t ideal either. Caffeine spikes cortisol, the stress hormone. As you wake up, your cortisol is already elevated, meaning caffeine will only increase it further, potentially leading to anxiety and jitteriness. An hour or two after waking up is the perfect time in this regard.
So, to conclude this scientific escapade, when it comes to caffeine, humanity’s favorite drug, it’s all about timing it just right, moderation, and sticking to the classics—not too early, not too late. Not four caffeinated beverages, but maybe just one or two. No monsters or Red Bulls, just good old-fashioned coffee. If you can stick to that, you’ll be a caffeine wizard!
