Many people do not start a day without having a nice cup of coffee, or a dose of caffeine in the afternoon in order to keep them awake and help them to get through the day. But coffee doesn’t only keep you awake and dynamic; it primarily stimulates the central nervous system to boost your mood, and enhance your mental and physical performance.
This substance has no taste, you can’t know if a product contains caffeine or not without reading its label. Most of the times, caffeine causes the same symptoms, but at least you will feel more energetic and powerful. However, too much of caffeine (more than 4 cups of coffee a day) can generate different and dangerous side effects.
High intakes of caffeine might cause anxiety and nervousness
Normally, caffeine is consumed to increase alertness; it blocks the effect of adenosine, and releases adrenaline to increase energy instead of feeling tired or sleepy. However, by time it becomes worse than this, causing anxiety. So, high intakes of caffeine which means over 1000 mg a day will cause nervousness immediately.
Caffeine can increase the risk of getting high blood pressure
Additionally, many studies have shown that very high doses of caffeine can eventually cause high blood pressure since it stimulates the nervous system. High blood pressure can generate heart diseases and strokes.
Many cups of coffee can make you feel tired and exhausted
Knowing that caffeine helps to keep you awake and full of energy, its energetic effect can turn out to the opposite once it leaves your body system, causing extreme fatigue.
Caffeine can affect your ability to control urination
Adding to all this, while having many cups of coffee, you might notice that you need to urinate frequently. Generally, increasing urination is one of high intakes of caffeine side effects, since it affects the bladder.
However, most studies have shown that caffeine has more effect on old people and people having overactive bladders.
All in all, even if caffeine can irritate the nervous system causing stress, muscle tremors, headache, nervousness… it has lots of benefits once its consumption is moderated, such as; decreasing cancer risk, skin protection, gout prevention, gut health and so on…
But how much is too much caffeine? How can we moderate our daily intakes of caffeine to avoid its side effects?
The U.S food and drug administration says that one tea spoon of powdered caffeine is equivalent to 28 cups of coffee. Such doses of caffeine can generate serious health problems.
In another word, studies have shown that 100 mg to 200 mg of caffeine which is about one to two cups of coffee per day are enough to get the results wanted. But when the consumption is above 300 mg to 700 mg, per day, you might have headache, insomnia and anxiety.
Furthermore, extremely high doses of more than 1000 mg per day (10 cups of coffee and more), may affect you very badly.
To sum up, caffeine isn’t as unhealthy as it seems, since you can moderate your daily intake of caffeine and enjoy your cup of coffee to enhance your health.
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