Caffeine's Dirty Little Secret |
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"How much is too much" is an impossible quetion |
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By Yasmin Tayag (The Atlantic) |
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How much caffeine is too much? You won’t find a simple answer anywhere.
Caffeine consumption is widely considered to be beneficial because it mostly is—boosting alertness, productivity, and even mood. But there is a point when guzzling caffeine tips over into uncomfortable, possibly unhealthy territory. The problem is that defining this point in discrete terms is virtually impossible. In the era of extreme caffeine, this is a dangerous way to live.
Caffeine routinely leads to jitteriness, nervousness, sweating, insomnia, and rapid heartbeat. If mild, such symptoms can be well worth the benefits.
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But consuming too much caffeine can have serious health impacts. High doses—more than 1,000 milligrams a day—can result in a state of intoxication known as caffeinism. The symptoms can be severe: People can “develop seizures and life-threatening irregularities of the heartbeat,” and some die, David Juurlink, a toxicology professor at the University of Toronto who also works at the Ontario Poison Centre, told me. “It’s one of the dirty little secrets, I’m afraid, of caffeine.”
You’re unlikely to ingest that much caffeine from beverages alone, yet the increasing availability of highly caffeinated products makes it more of a possibility than ever before.
Dozens of energy drinks contain extreme amounts of caffeine, and some come in candy-inspired flavors such as Bubblicious and Sour Patch Kids. Less potent but highly snackable products include caffeinated coffee cubes, energy chews, marshmallows, mints, ice pops, and even vapes. Consumed quickly and in rapid succession, these foods can lead to potentially toxic caffeine intake “because your body hasn’t had time to tell you to stop,” Jennifer Temple, a professor at the University of Buffalo who studies caffeine use, told me.
More than ever, we need a way to track our caffeine consumption, but we don’t seem to have any good options. But most of us just aren’t used to thinking about caffeine in numerical terms the way we do with calories and alcohol by volume (ABV). Caffeine intake is generally something that’s not measured but experienced: I know, for example, that a double espresso from the office coffee machine will give me the shakes.
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The FDA does have a recommended daily caffeine limit of 400 milligrams, the equivalent of about four or five cups of coffee. “Based on the relevant science and information available,” a spokesperson told me, consuming that much each day “does not raise safety concerns” for most adults, except for people who are pregnant or nursing, or have concerns related to their health conditions or the medication they take.
The FDA’s daily recommendation is a “rough guideline” that can’t be used as a universal standard, because “it’s not safe for everybody,” Temple said. For one person, 237 milligrams could mean a trip to the hospital; for another, that would just be breakfast. The effect of a given caffeine dose “varies tremendously from person to person based upon their historical pattern of use and also their genetics,” Juurlink told me.
Although people generally aren’t aware of the amounts of caffeine they consume, they tend to develop a good sense of how much they can handle, Temple said. But usually, this knowledge is product-specific; when trying a new caffeine product, the effect can be hard to predict. Part of the problem is that the amount of caffeine in products varies dramatically, even among drinks that may seem similar:
A 12-ounce Americano from McDonald’s contains 71 milligrams of caffeine, but the same drink at Starbucks contains 150 milligrams. The caffeine in popular energy drinks ranges from 75 milligrams (Ocean Spray Cran-Energy) to 316 milligrams (Redline Xtreme), according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
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The reason we aren’t good at thinking about caffeine is that historically, we’ve never really had to think that hard about it. Sure, one too many espressos might have occasionally put someone over the edge, but caffeine was consumed and sold in amounts that didn’t require as much thought or caution. “A generation ago, you didn’t have all these energy drinks,” so people didn’t grow up learning about safe caffeine consumption the way they may have done for alcohol, Darin Detwiler, a food-policy expert at Northeastern University, told me.
Last year, a child reportedly went into cardiac arrest after drinking a can of Prime Energy—prompting Senator Chuck Schumer to call on the FDA to investigate its “eye-popping caffeine content.”
Nothing else in our daily diet is quite like caffeine.
Certainly people swear by it, and its benefits are clear: Research shows that it can improve cognitive performance, speed up reaction time, and boost logical reasoning, and it may even reduce the risk of Parkinson’s, diabetes, liver disease, and cancer. But for a substance so ubiquitous that it’s called the most widely used drug in the world, our grasp of how to maximize its benefits is feeble at best.
Even the most seasoned coffee drinkers sometimes unintentionally get too wired; as new, more highly caffeinated products become available, instances of caffeine drinkers overdoing it will probably become more common. Perhaps the best we can do is learn how much of each drink we can handle, one super-charged sip at a time.
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