Is your whole morning routine built around having time to ingest at least one caffeinated beverage before work? If so, you aren’t alone.
Recent figures from the National Coffee Association show that the share of American adults drinking at least one cup of coffee a day has reached a historical high — roughly 66%.
While caffeine is commonly understood to be a stimulant, most people probably don’t know what it does to the body or how long it sticks around.
Truth be told, even the medical community is a bit hazy about the inner workings of caffeine, according to USA Today.
Caffeine is believed to reduce sleepiness and uplift moods by blocking different adenosine receptors in the brain.
For instance, the A1 receptor promotes sleepiness when activated, so by blocking it, caffeine can increase alertness.
Furthermore, caffeine blocks the A2A receptor, thereby triggering the body to produce higher dopamine levels. This neurochemical is part of the brain’s reward system and has mood-enhancing effects.
The A2A receptor does become desensitized over time, so frequent coffee drinkers shouldn’t expect a bout of euphoria with every cup of joe.
In terms of how long these effects last, the answer can vary.
The amount of caffeine in the body is halved by around 4 to 6 hours after ingestion. Still, some people can drink caffeinated beverages throughout the day and have no trouble sleeping at night, whereas others might toss and turn after just one afternoon espresso.
In the end, the effects of caffeine depend largely on the individual, just as some people might report feeling jittery instead of alert after a cup of coffee.
Despite the mystery surrounding how caffeine works, recent research suggests that there are health benefits linked to consuming it regularly.
For instance, Americans drink an average of 76 mg of caffeine daily. This is nearly enough to increase energy expenditure by about 100 calories.
As such, some research has pointed to a nonnegligible correlation between regularly consuming caffeine and maintaining a healthy weight, as The Dallas Express reported.
This might be food for thought, considering that the ongoing obesity crisis is being linked to increasingly more negative health outcomes, including dementia, infertility, eye disease, and other severe illnesses, as The Dallas Express has extensively covered.
Drinking three cups of caffeinated coffee daily was also recently linked to improved liver function, according to Dr. Blanca Lizaola-Mayo of the Liver Transplant Center at the Mayo Clinic in Arizona.
Coffee by itself has also been shown to have several other properties connected to maintaining good health, despite being once listed as a possible carcinogen by the WHO in the 1990s.
Not only is it anti-inflammatory, but it also contains antioxidants that can protect cells and lignans that can prevent the spread of cancer cells.
