Your Brain on Frappuccino

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Frank <califpacific

Mon Aug 23, 2004 8:46 am

Your Brain on Frappuccino

 

 

http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/19622/

 

Your Brain on Frappuccino

By Roger Downey, Seattle Weekly

Posted on August 20, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/19622/

 

The U.S. government allocates many billions of dollars

a year to the " War on Drugs, " but it spends hardly a

penny on the most insidious, most omnipresent

psychoactive drug of all.

 

I refer, of course, to caffeine (C8H10N4O2), the little alkaloid

that made Starbucks' Howard Schultz a billionaire.

 

Drug? Indubitably:

 

Even before it became endemic in the human diet through use in candy

bars and soft drinks, doctors prescribed caffeine as a decongestant

and mild painkiller; users discovered its efficacy as

an appetite suppressant on their own.

 

But it would be just another minor entry in the pharmacopeia were

it not for another aspect: its powerful impact as a

stimulant.

 

That's where the psychoactive aspect of caffeine kicks

in.

 

Unlike most small organic molecules, caffeine

slips through cell walls as if they weren't there. An

hour after your cuppa, caffeine's to be found in every

cell in your body,

including those of the nervous system;

even the famed " blood-brain barrier " is

impotent against its stealth attacks.

 

After more than a century of concentrated study,

scientists are still not entirely sure what happens

when caffeine hits the brain.

 

The current best guess is that it plugs into receptors in cells that

modulate " excitability, " the propensity of neurons to fire,

sending messages to other nerve circuits in the brain.

 

Caffeine fits these receptors well enough to prevent

their proper trigger (adenosine) from plugging in, but

not well enough to mimic the downstream calming effect

of adenosine.

Result: The brain remains in a state of

higher excitability, alertness, and clarity, not to

mention irritability, than it would maintain without

caffeine's intrusion.

 

So far, so good; everybody recognizes the energizing

jolt a good cup of coffee delivers. (The size of the

jolt depends on the mode of delivery: An espresso

contains about a fifth of a gram of the stuff, drip

coffee only half as much.)

 

The trouble is that most of us users don't stop with one cup, and

the spread of fancied-up ways of absorbing your jolt – lattes,

Frappuccinos, and the like – has made it perilously

easy to saturate the system with a drug that, its

agreeable stimulation apart, is pretty hard on the

nervous system.

 

Some people can't even handle that one espresso

without experiencing feelings of anxiety.

When the

dosage rises above 600 milligrams (only about three

shots' worth), a majority of imbibers experience side

effects like nervousness and irritability; many also

experience higher blood pressure without realizing it.

 

Even if your system is highly tolerant to caffeine, a

gram a day can cause irregular heartbeat and ringing

in the ears, not to mention insomnia, outbursts of

temper, and heightened distractibility.

 

Ten grams of it and you're dead.

 

Granted, it's almost impossible to

absorb 10 grams of caffeine by the usual methods, but

it's still a little worrisome that the difference

between a useful dose and a deadly one is a mere

matter of 50 to one.

 

Another worrisome aspect of caffeine is that many of

its users develop a tolerance to its effects – in

others words, you start with a single short and

eventually only a triple grande will do.

This happens

with most drugs that interfere with normal

neurotransmitter pathways, which are linked in

intricate loops of potentiation and feedback.

 

When we block adenosine from its target receptors, the

nervous system tries to restore its balance by

producing more adenosine to compete with the caffeine

that's blocking it, so over time it takes more

caffeine to overcome the additional adenosine's

calming, soporific effect.

 

No two people exhibit exactly the same pattern of tolerances, so

there's no way to establish a " safe " dose except through trial

and error, leaving plenty of room for the insomnia,

heart flutters, and sour stomach that result from an

" overdose. "

 

Is caffeine a drug of abuse? Americans think of

themselves as mighty coffee drinkers, but in fact they

swallow less than half as much per capita (around one

espresso's worth) as the Swedes or the Brits, who,

counting tea and chocolate consumption along with

coffee, are the current world champions, putting away

nearly half a gram of caffeine a day on average.

 

On average – that's the problem with stats like these.

There are a lot of people who don't drink coffee or

tea at all, and averages don't help to discern how

caffeine use differs by age, class, and income group.

 

The most upsetting fact about caffeine is that there

is virtually no good information about the impact of

caffeine use on children and adolescents, who, thanks

to soft drinks and chocolate-packed candies have

become a major segment of the caffeine market.

Kids'

nervous systems are not completely developed until

late adolescence, and nobody knows what effect on the

final product a dozen-plus years of steady infusion of

a powerful alkaloid stimulant may have.

 

On balance, Howard Schultz may be America's biggest

pusher for adults, but one of these days it may turn

out that Coke and Pepsi have a lot more to answer for.

 

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights

reserved.

 

View this story online at:

http://www.alternet.org/story/19622/

[FloridaJo]

My old friend always asks me out for a Frappucinno at Starbucks.

Lately he's been ordering Vente with an extra shot of 'roast' or caffeine.

While drinking this last one, he got a stroke and is now in the hospital.

His blood pressure was sky high.

It seems he'll be okay for now. He is responding to drugs.