Blog for all health-conscious: Fooducate Blog

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Fooducate Blog - How Caffeinated are You?

Posted: 29 Dec 2011 04:21 AM PST

Here’s an interesting factoid: It takes our body close to 8 hours to metabolize a single cup of coffee. A cup of coffee can contain 65-175mg of caffeine. The benchmark is 100mg, and the current recommendation is to drink up to 3 cups of coffee per day. Which means that drinking all 3 cups may leave your body continually caffeinated.

Is this a problem?

Most Americans never get the caffeine out of their system according to Jamie McDermott, a registered dietitian with Solace Clinic.

“More than 500 milligrams a day is considered too much by most health organizations,” she said. “I believe caffeine becomes more than a habit when someone ‘needs’ it to get through their morning or day or [when] they need more and more of it.

“We become conditioned to it — some even build a tolerance — so that what once worked to wake them up now does not.” Read more from the Times Free Press…

Side effects of caffeine include insomnia and irritability, but can lead to tremors and heart palpitations. Teenagers overdosing on energy drinks have found themselves in emergency rooms.

So, are you consuming too much caffeine?

Here’s a list of some common drinks and their caffeine content. Use it to calculate how perky you might be at any given time during the day…

Cup of coffee………………………………..………… 65-175mg
Decaf coffee……………………….………………… less than 5mg
Cup of black tea……………………………………… 70mg
Green Tea……………………………………………… 15-50mg

Water…………………………………………………….. 0mg
Sprite (12 fl oz)………………………………………… 0mg
Coke Classic (12 fl oz)………………………………34mg
Diet Coke (12 fl oz)………………………………….45mg
Mountain Dew (12 fl oz)………………………….55mg
Iced Tea (12 fl oz)……………………………………70mg
Red Bull (12 fl oz equivalent)………….……… 115mg
Redline Energy Drink (12 fl oz equivalent)…. 375mg
Cocaine Energy Drink (12 fl oz equivalent)..…400mg

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