What happens inside your body when you take too much caffeine
Experts have given an insight into what exactly happens inside your body when you take too much caffeine.
Caffeine is something that most Brits consume every single day religiously.
Whether it's in the form of a morning coffee, tea, or a can of your favourite fizzy drink, it’s in a lot of our most-loved beverages.
Too much caffeine?
But a brand of lemonade in the US has recently been banned amid accusations that the amount of caffeine in the drink was too high.
This is despite being within the countries recommended daily intake guidelines.
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This has raised questions about how much caffeine is too much, and whether guidelines should be changed.
How does caffeine affect the body?
Some of the most crucial functions at play in our body include heart rate, blood flow, and sleep cycles - which are all affected by a chemical called adenosine.
This occurs naturally in the body, and it’s the job of this chemical to make us tired at the end of the day.
However, when we consume caffeine, it’s absorbed into the bloodstream quickly, where it out-competes adenosine.
It does this by preventing it from connecting to receptors and doing its job - making us feel more awake and alert.
Caffeine can also boost the levels of dopamine and adrenaline, which help make you feel more stimulated.
Effects on the brain
Talking to BBC Future, Damian Bailey, professor of physiology, said: “The brain is like a big muscle. It needs to perform things, and dopamine, adrenaline and caffeine all stimulate it.”
As one of the biggest contributors of caffeine in the world, there is a lot of evidence about the effects of coffee on our health.
A study found that drinking three to four cups of coffee a day was more often linked to health benefits rather than harm - which is good news for all you coffee addicts out there!
One area where things get a bit tricky is heart health
A study of almost 19,000 people found that, while drinking more than two cups of coffee a day was linked to higher risk of death among people who had high blood pressure, this wasn’t the case among those with healthy blood pressure.
And in review of that evidence, scientists have concluded that while moderate coffee consumption can actually lower the risk of death, high blood pressure and heart failure, there was no clear cut correlation found on heart disease risk.
So, it looks as though your coffee addiction might not be as detrimental as you first thought!
Topics: Health, Food And Drink
Mia Williams