How Bad Is Caffeine?

It has come to my attention lately that I drink a fair amount of coffee, which contains a fair amount of caffeine. I realised this after being told that 8 cups of coffee per day is bad news. It was brought to my attention by a member of staff in the sales team, but he couldn’t tell me why caffeine was such ‘bad news’.

This got me wondering – how bad is caffeine really? Should a coffee lover such as myself be worried?
After doing a little bit of research into it, I found an array of rather scary sounding side effects. It didn’t take me long to realise that most of the ‘side effects’ listed on various ‘health’ websites were there to simply scare me into buying their products and subscriptions, so I spent a bit more time looking into it, using trusted medical websites.

After a few hours research, and a few hundred cups of coffee to power me on, I managed to create a condensed list of caffeine/coffee side effects to show the guys in the office.

Here is the exact list (our personal thoughts are in the brackets):

1. Caffeine irritates the stomach lining and causes excess acid levels (bad)
2. Causes messages to pass around the body faster (good, I think)
3. Raises blood pressure (not so good)
4. Makes indigestion slower (not great news)
5. Stimulates blood circulation (quite sure this is good)
6. Stimulates the heart and nervous system (bad in the long run)
7. Makes blood sludgy and rubbish from fat in caffeine (sounds awful!)
8. Increases alertness and reduces tiredness (very good ‘side effect’)
9. Causes shaking hands (very irritating)
10. Causes simulation as a result of blood sugar release (not so bad)
11. Has a diuretic effect (won’t go there)
12. Can cause oversensitive pancreas (bad)
13. Can cause sleep deprivation (bad in most cases)
14. Can damage the respiratory system (dreadful)
15. Can prevent heart diseases (horary)

As you can see, this is a pretty mixed bag of results. Although there seems to be some pretty nasty stuff there, I wouldn’t say that there is enough to stop me drinking coffee.

So, for the time being, I’ll take my chances with getting an oversensitive pancreas and I’ll put up with the shaking hands so that I can enjoy a stimulated and energised day of work!
…oh, and let’s not forget how good coffee tastes.

Resource: http://gblhomesolutions.com/how-bad-is-caffeine/