As you sip your morning coffee you can comfort yourself with the knowledge that it is not doing you much harm. Depending on how it is made, the 70 to 180 mg of caffeine it contains will help ward off drowsiness and perk you up. In the process it will pump up your blood pressure, just a little. For every cup you have during the day, your systolic and diastolic pressures will increase by about 0.8 and 0.5 respectively.

If you have normal blood pressure this is not of concern, but if you tend to be hypertensive, it could be. It will also raise the levels of your stress hormones, adrenaline and noradrenaline. This doesn’t matter if you are heading for a day on the beach. But if you are facing a stressful day at work, each coffee will compound that stress. Reaching for coffee in times of stress is like reaching for gasoline to put out a fire.

Caffeine can also compound the effects of other drugs you may be on such as some cough and cold preparations, the old antidepressants and perhaps even the new ones. In different ways, these drugs increase stress hormones. If taken with caffeine their effect could be compounded.

Caffeine is probably the most popular drug in Australia, and the country is thick with people who, without realising it, are addicted to it. As long as they keep getting a hit, most cope very well. But some don’t manage. They have all the symptoms of excessive caffeine consumption – anxiety, restlessness and insomnia – but never link these to their coffee intake.

Sometimes their doctors also fail to see the link and misdiagnose them as having anxiety neuroses (see the Caffeine Case Study later in this section).

While you can feel ill from too much coffee, it is unlikely to kill you. To ingest a lethal dose of 5 to 10 grams of caffeine, you would have to drink well over 50 cups at one sitting. The sheer discomfort of swallowing such a quantity of fluid would be sufficiently self-limiting to make an accidental overdose highly unlikely.

However, while it is widely known there is caffeine in coffee, tea, chocolate and some soft drinks, it is less well known that in the last few years large quantities of caffeine have been creeping into other foods and beverages, particularly those used in the disco, fitness and sports industry. These products are often poorly labelled and do not warn that they deliver a massive caffeine hit.

Taken in addition to caffeine from traditional sources, they can cause ‘caffeinism’, which is accompanied by nausea, jitteriness, light-headedness, indigestion, irregular heartbeat and the need to pass urine frequendy. This can be followed by acute symptoms of withdrawal that usually occur during the first 20 to 48 hours after you stop taking the extra caffeine and can persist for several days. Headaches, nausea, nervousness, reduced alertness and a depressed mood are typical symptoms.

Withdrawal headaches are probably due to the vascular effects of changing levels of caffeine in the blood and brain. One pharmacologist experienced them for herself. For years, the staff in her department would brew their own coffee every morning. When their coffee machine broke, they made it in an unused beaker that had been discarded by the laboratory.

‘For the next three Saturdays, just after lunch, I would develop a very severe headache,’ she said. ‘The third time it dawned on me that 1 had been having more caffeine than normal because it was more concentrated in the beaker and I was still having the same amount. I’m fairly sensitive to caffeine and once I started diluting my coffee every morning, the headaches vanished.’

This same control was not available to a 25-year-old West Australian woman who died following a massive dose of caffeine. Because she had a heart-valve problem, this woman had always taken care to minimise her caffeine intake. However, the packaging of the fashionable energy-boosting drink she had consumed had given no indication of its high caffeine content. It contained the herbal preparation guarana, which is high in caffeine and is now being increasingly added to sports drinks and foods, the claim being that it increases stamina and endurance. The caffeine was considered likely to have contributed to her death.

Guarana, which comes from a South American plant, is fashionable among youth as a naturally occurring stimulant and is also a popular complementary medicine.

Caffeine addiction can be insidious and addicts often have to keep upping their dose to get the same effects. They might do this by drinking more cups a day, by making each cup stronger or by augmenting their intake from other sources.

Caffeine affects people differently. In some, the effect of a single cup of coffee (about 150 mg of caffeine) can last 2 hours. In others it may last 10. A caffeine addiction rarely exists in isolation. Because the tannin in coffee is bitter, high coffee consumption is usually also associated with a high sugar intake. In fact, a coffee addiction is usually associated with an unhealthy lifestyle.

Typically a coffee addict will be deskbound, start and end the day with coffee and eat appallingly poor-quality food in between. He will be sweaty, overweight, irritable, sleeping poorly and nursing a low libido. If his coffee is taken away, eventually other unhealthy things associated with it, such as the sugar and the cigarette, will often disappear too.

Despite almost 30 years of research into the subject, there is an enormous amount of conflicting research into caffeine. For example, some researchers say caffeine causes headaches. Others say it can cure them. While one group is certain high doses can help relieve muscle pain, another says it brings it on. Ultimately there is little consensus.

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