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Rethinking Your Morning Coffee
Spreading Your Caffeine Intake Throughout The Day May Be Better Than Gulping It At Breakfast


May 17th, 2004

By Louis Wittig : eCureMe Staff Writer



Can’t get up without your morning coffee? Chances are you’re one of the many Americans who frontloads their coffee consumption, drinking a couple cups before noon in order to keep fresh all day. However a new study, published in the journal Sleep, suggests that your familiar caffeine infusion tapers off just when your body needs it the most.


You may not give your coffee drinking habits much thought, but Dr. James Wyatt of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago does. Dr. Wyatt and a team researchers wanted to find out whether caffeine helped to mitigate sleepiness because it interfered with the body’s circadian rhythm (the biological process that makes people sleepy according to daily cycles, regardless of how tired they are) or because it interrupted a chemical process that makes people sleepier the longer they’ve been awake. 16 volunteers were gathered and observed for a month. All were made to live in windowless rooms, so they wouldn’t know day from night, and thus their circadian rhythms would be irrelevant. Then they were made to stay up for 29 hours at a spell. One group of participants was given low doses of caffeine every hour, each equal to about two ounces of coffee. The other group wasn’t given any stimulants.


The group that was caffeinated regularly did much better on cognitive tests, and fell asleep less often. Unlike other studies, where volunteers were given a single, massive dose of caffeine, participants in this study largely avoided any negative side effects, like sleeplessness or tremors.


The scientists drew two important conclusions. The first was that, since circadian rhythms weren’t contributing to the volunteer’s sleepiness, the caffeine they received must have been interfering with the chemical process that makes people drowsy. This adds support to the hypothesis that caffeine blocks the receptors in the brain that process adenosine, a neurotransmitter that builds up the longer one has been awake.


Their second conclusion was that dosage and timing matter. Previous studies have shown that when a lot of caffeine is consumed all at once, its effects taper off within a few hours. So when you stop at Starbucks on your way to work, the jolt it gives you won’t be there by the afternoon. The volunteers in this study managed to keep up for more than a day by being on a more even keel, with constant, low doses of caffeine. Following that model by drinking a little coffee all day long " is an entirely new way to use caffeine to maintain alertness and performance in the face of sleep loss," Wyatt told reporters.


Contact Louis Wittig at louis@eCureMe.com




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