caffeine will make up for lost sleep [Music] caffeine detoxes your body oh please no caffeine is addictive this is a good one hi my name is dr sophie balzoura i’m a gastroenterologist at nyu grossman school of medicine hi my name is dr ugor roku i’m a gastroenterologist at mount sinai hospital and today we’ll be debunking myths about caffeine caffeine is bad for you caffeine is not bad for you so there was a time where i must admit i had bought the hype that caffeine was bad for you but when you do the research you find out that a lot of the concerns really don’t hold up the concerns about caffeine causing osteoporosis but when you look at it the amount of milligrams that they need to consume to cause that are excessive of 700 milligrams a day the amount of caffeine that’s being consumed daily is usually on the order of less than 300 milligrams a day and so a lot of these concerns really don’t apply at those levels there’s actually a lot of benefit to caffeine and coffee so there have been studies showing you know decreasing cancers like colon cancer head and neck cancers breast cancer chronic liver disease a lot of other kind of inflammatory conditions that we worry about so chemicals that are able to act upon that and reduce inflammatory processes and caffeine is one of those compounds that can do that three cups of coffee is seen to lower your risk of stroke in certain studies tea can do the same by lowering the risk by 20 and also dark chocolate and then those few instances where your specials may tell you to cut down on caffeine whether it’s your cardiologist or your gastroenterologist those are isolated cases so speak to your doctor but in general myth caffeine is not in general bad for you caffeine will make up for lost sleep [Music] that’s a myth because there is nothing that could make up for lost sleep other than adequate restful replenishing sleep all caffeine dead is increase your alertness and make you feel like you’re more energetic but it doesn’t actually give you more energy nature has created an important molecule called adenosine and that’s this molecule over here and essentially adenosine tells your brain it’s time to go to bed what caffeine does is to block adenosine message and keep you thinking that you should be awake but when the effect of caffeine wears off the adenosine’s still there and your body will still crash and go to bed if a person does choose to neglect their sleep and try to replace that with caffeine they’re going to find that their sleep pattern is just continually affected they’ll have lower levels of rem sleep and if you drink too close to bedtime they’ll actually have a decreased amount of sleep as well ultimately the brain needs sleep and you’re not going to get that from consuming extra amounts of caffeine this is a good one decaf coffee doesn’t have caffeine i’ve been waiting to do this decaf may sound like they completely deed the calf but it does not mean that it just means it’s reduced i think by the fda formal recommendations are that they should be 95 of the caffeine taken away from a content before it can be called a decaf but sometimes there can be variation from cup to cup to cup you might see it somewhere on the order of 15 or so milligrams a cup and again this is as compared to 80 to like 160 milligrams depending on the exact type of coffee you’re drinking as a gastroenterologist if i’m talking to a person who has a lot of acid reflux sometimes what we want to do is to reduce the amount of caffeine that the person takes not down to zero the reduced amount sometimes does help that person get over their reflux symptoms a little better it’s not zero but it’s a lot less caffeine than typically you would find in that cup drinking coffee will stunt your growth so thankfully drinking coffee uh drinking caffeine all those things do not stunt your growth most of our growth happens during our childhood and adolescence of course ultimately once bone growth is complete then there’s no stunting of growth that occurs when you look at the amount of caffeine consumption in teenagers it usually typically maxes out at about 80 milligrams a day and any kind of risk to your bones with calcium or magnesium loss again usually occurs above 700 milligrams a day so the kids will be fine they’re not consuming in general enough caffeine to really warrant any concern about calcium lost from their bones 700 800 grams a day that’s like at least like eight plus cups of coffee that’s so it’s a lot of that that’s a that’s a huge amount so i mean the things that affect bone growth the most would be the health status of the kid chronic illnesses or something that causes malnutrition for instance genetics so how tall are your parents how tall your siblings those are the types of things that really impact growth it’s not really going to be caffeine consumption what she said caffeine and soda is much less than caffeine and coffee i’m going to say that that’s a myth i think that what’s important to know and i think what people don’t really realize is that it really depends on the beverage there are some sodas that have tons of caffeine right significantly higher amounts than what we consider in an average cup of coffee you really got to look at that label to see what the caffeine content is so as you can see here soda has 40 milligrams in that can of cola and that’s a greater than your shot of espresso which only has 27 milligrams at the same time it’s also less than your black tea which has 45 milligrams less than your instant coffee at 82 milligrams and less than your brewed coffee at 95 milligrams these are averages but it just goes to show that soda can just have have more caffeine than some drinks and less than others caffeine detoxes your body oh please no one of the more common conversations i’ll have with my patients is about this concept of detoxification they may see something on the internet which promises that no matter what you eat or consume that if you take this detoxification product it just takes out all the bad items and leaves you feeling healthy unfortunately it’s not that easy it’s better to watch what you’re putting your body before you put it in there than to try to edit it after it’s already been incorporated and so this concept of caffeine as a detoxifying agent is one of them because it can lead to people using it as an enema so that means when they insert fluid into the rectum up to their colon but it’s not safe it has not been proven and it could lead to a lot of injury in the colon burning perforation even that is what the kidneys for that is what the liver is for that is what your intestines are for really is to get rid of waste if there’s one detoxifying agent it’s just water you just want to make sure you’re drinking enough water so that your bowels are moving your kidneys are happy the urine is flowing the body will take care of the rest caffeine dehydrates you this is one of those tricky ones that’s not completely true caffeine is a mild diuretic if you consume about 300 milligrams of caffeine it might slightly increase your urine output by about four fluid ounces but that’s not a large amount especially if you think about the fact that a lot of the ways we consume caffeine are filled with water themselves so i’m going to call this myth i could not agree more ugo i think that’s a huge myth i think that people can get thirsty after drinking caffeine especially if you’re adding things to the caffeine right or if there’s a lot of extra sugar in that caffeine then that can make you thirsty and so it’s not really the caffeine itself that is causing that sensation of thirst but perhaps the additives to the drink um as a whole the other thing is that everyone gets thirsty and so you probably just aren’t drinking enough fluids so a cup of coffee is not going to do it make sure you’re drinking a lot of fluid throughout the day caffeine is addictive this is a good one caffeine is not considered an addicting substance there is a need to use it oftentimes routinely to maintain alertness especially in the morning right upon rising but at the end of the day it’s considered that your physical dependence on caffeine as a substance is not so severe to truly call it an addiction if you were to go cold turkey with your coffee intake as much as that scares you you’d feel horrible for about a day or two lasting for an additional week you’d feel off but then you’d find yourself back to a new normal and so no caffeine is not necessarily an addictive substance caffeine is short acting there’s no danger in going you know completely cold turkey from drinking caffeine every day you know multiple cups just stopping having more than one cup of coffee a day is bad for you i’d say that’s definitely a myth the general thought is that if you’re consuming 400 milligrams or less of caffeine in a day that’s a very safe amount for you to consume now what you have to remember is what’s in a cup may differ depending on exactly how big that cup is and exactly what type of caffeine preparation you’re drinking so you want to define what a cup is typically it’s eight fluid ounces you can have many of those before you run into that 400 level which is considered a nice low level that you can reach every day not all things are equal it applies to different people so if you’re pregnant for instance if you may have certain heart conditions or gastrointestinal conditions then those kind of rules may vary and you may have a recommendation from your physician that you may be drinking much less than that if at all so all my patients who are about to show me this video stop this applies to you for different reasons you can’t have that fourth cup but maybe when you’re feeling better we’ll talk about it you won’t be able to sleep if you have caffeine at night i’m gonna say this is a myth so when i drink coffee at night nothing happens the way that caffeine affects you and your brain really varies from person to person so we can’t have this blanket statement saying you know you can’t drink caffeine or coffee before bedtime so part of the reason why people can drink caffeine at different hours of the day has a lot to do with how you metabolize it in your body and that is in large part due to genetics it’s good to note that a caffeine as a molecule has a half-life of five hours what does that mean it means that five hours after you consume it you’ll just have about 50 of that cup of coffee left in your body the one thing we will say is that drinking a lot of caffeine especially close to bedtime will probably affect your sleep health you might find that you have a less amount of sleep per night or less amount of hours getting that good deep refreshing rem sleep but again everyone metabolizes things slightly differently it’s not consumed in a vacuum right there’s so many other things going on in our day-to-day that affect how tired we are how alert we need to be so if you’ve been up all day and you’ve exerted a lot of energy and you’re just tired and fatigued you will still crash and go to bed caffeine can mess with your heart rhythm i am going to say myth to this this is actually an issue that has been studied extensively there was a recently performed study where they looked at a community-based cohort of over 30 000 people and what they found was that caffeine intake in moderate levels did not increase risk of arrhythmias in fact they found that for every additional cup you had you had a three percent decrease in your likelihood of having an arrhythmia sometimes people can get heart palpitations or feel like their heart is racing which we call tachycardia right and that can happen with caffeine and there can also even be a transient increase in your blood pressure but these things are not long lasting these things aren’t dangerous and what’s even more good news is that for habitual coffee drinkers or caffeine consumers that effect eventually wears away so when we think about abnormal heart rhythms or dangers to the heart we actually see that caffeine is protective talk to your cardiologist but thus far myth oh this is a hard one tea is healthier than coffee i’m gonna call it a myth and the reason why i call it a myth is that you cannot say tea is healthier than coffee as a blanket statement and it always holds true if you dump tons of sugar in your tea you cannot still say that that’s a healthy beverage and then to balance that coffee can be very healthy as well coffee again is a major source of antioxidants for americans we don’t perhaps eat enough fruits and vegetables and so we end up getting a lot of things that we should be getting from fruits and vegetables believe it or not from our coffee plant what we also need to understand is that i think there’s a lot of more robust data for coffee and it’s been studied a little bit more and we can make more kind of concrete statements about its benefits so it’s not to say that tea benefits aren’t there or that we know for a fact that tea is healthier than coffee because we don’t but right now you know we have to say this is a myth if you’re trying to drink one over another for health benefits and it’s about the caffeine you know i think it’s comparable i think that there’s this misconception that there’s not as much caffeine in tea which is quite false and it all depends on exactly what tea and what coffee you’re talking about we’re trying to use generic terms for very different substances you have teas like real boys teas and teas that are green teas and earl teas they’re all very different with different components in general they tend to represent a good healthy source of caffeine and other substances but so do coffees too the way you prepare your coffee doesn’t matter myth there’s so many different ways to prepare coffee and it does matter in terms of how much caffeine results in that cup so if you look at this little graphic it shows you a number of things that might affect the amount of caffeine that’s in your beverage what’s the particle size what’s the brew time how hot is the water you’re using for your brewing and then also how much are you diluting your actual caffeine in your content you tend to have a fairly high quantity of caffeine in your coffee pods because it’s ground really finely the temperature used to brew it is very hot and so a lot of caffeine can be extracted up to 75 to 150 milligrams per cup for your french press although there is a prolonged brewing time oftentimes the actual size of the grinding is very coarse and so that limits the amount of caffeine that you’ll find in your fresh press and also where it comes from too i think where the bean actually originates can affect how much caffeine is present so at the end of the day i think what we learned is that caffeine actually can be very good for you despite all the myths that we’ve heard all our lives i think that some people have guilt around drinking caffeine and coffee but there’s so many benefits very few risks of course it’s important to talk to your doctor about what’s best for you but ultimately we don’t want to deprive people of something that they love because the benefits are abound and you know what it really tastes great [Laughter]
