Caffeine: How It Works And What It Does To Our Body!

A cup of hot coffee in the morning: some people can't even function without it!
Coffee is the world's most popular drug, and many people depend on it for their daily performance.
Some statistics even suggest that up to 90% of Americans consume coffee on a regular basis!
It gives you an energy boost, and makes you feel more alert to fight that fatigue in the morning or the afternoon-low.
And Caffeine use actually dates way back to early human history.
Naturally, caffeine can be found in coffee beans (obviously), but also the Kola nut, Guarana, certain tea leaves (especially black tea) and Yerba Mate.
(The coffee plant itself actually produces caffeine as a pesticide to keep away harmful bugs!)

But how exactly does caffeine work, what happens in our body when we drink it, and is too much of it harmful?

To understand how caffeine works, we first need to look at a chemical called Adenosine.

This is a byproduct of ATP (the energy that our body uses for everything), and it accumulates more and more throughout the day.
Adenosine is what makes us drowsy or sleepy - the longer we're awake, the more Adenosine assembles in our brain and binds to special receptor cells there, the more tired we feel.
When we sleep, the adenosine levels decrease again.

Caffeine only stimulates our brain because it is extremely similar in shape and structure to adenosine.

So it fits into the same receptor cells - just like 2 almost identical keys might fit in the same lock.
Through the bloodstream, our caffeine reaches our brain, and binds with the receptors - blocking them from the ability to bind with any Adenosine.
So instead of feeling tired, the caffeine makes you feel awake and actually stimulates your fight-or-flight system:
Your brain can't tell the difference between a large espresso or an emergency situation, so it reacts in the same way.
Your adrenaline levels increase, as well as your heart rate, blood pressure rises, you feel more alert!

But this effect doesn't last forever.

After around 6 hours, only 50% of caffeine are still in your system, which is why most people need to drink several cups of coffee in order to keep up the level of alertness they'd like to achieve.
As the caffeine levels in your blood decrease, more receptors are free to bind with adenosine again, making you feel more sleepy.

When you consume caffeine regularly, your brain actually creates new adenosine receptors - which means that you would need more caffeine to block them and achieve the same level of alertness that you experienced before.
In return, this also means that you can experience withdrawal symptoms when you don't get your daily caffeine intake.
Tolerance, withdrawal symptoms... all of this sounds a lot like a typical drug, right?
Caffeine actually shows the exact same bodily responses like cocaine - just in a much lesser form.
Well, while caffeine is slightly addictive and it is a drug, it's not officially considered a harmful drug, and it doesn't stimulate our reward system, which is the most important aspect of regular drugs.

It's recommended that the average person consumes only about 300mg of caffeine daily (which equals about 2 cups of coffee), but this obviously depends on the body weight as well.

Could too much caffeine kill you?

Yes - but it's almost physically impossible to reach that point when drinking coffee.
150mg per kilogram of your bodyweight would be needed for a deadly dosis - if someone weighs 70kg, that would be 14,000 mg (one average cup of coffee has about 150mg of caffeine).
So you would need to drink 70 cups of coffee within a very short period of time - and you would probably throw up before reaching that huge number.

Whether you are a coffe lover or not (I personally am not), the effect of caffeine on the body is very stimulating, so no wonder that a lot of people have made it part of their daily routine.

But keep in mind that too much of anything isn't good, and that you will gradually build up a tolerance as well!

Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

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