Giving your caffeine kick the boot
By Tim van der Kooi
tm679891@dal.ca
Coffee addicts are everywhere. You might be one of them. It doesn’t matter how many cups you drink in a day.
“A coffee addict is a person who has physiological symptoms of withdrawal in the form of irritability and headaches when they are unable to get coffee,” says Donald Weaver, a neurologist from Dalhousie University.
“If you’re in the state when you say, ‘Man, if I don’t get my coffee I’ll be in rough shape,’ then you’re probably addicted.”
Mariko MacLean, a supervisor of events for the RCR Hospitality Group at the Cunard Centre, falls into the category of addiction. She started drinking coffee when she was a 15-year-old working at the restaurant, Jane’s on the Common.
Seven years later, MacLean drinks about six cups to get her through the day.
“I think it’s a little bit silly that I actually depend on coffee, but I don’t think I’m the biggest caffeine addict out there,” she says. “It’s an environmental influence, for sure.”
MacLean says she drinks a lot more depending on her shifts at work. During the busier summer months at the Cunard Centre, a 12-hour shift starting at 6 a.m. is a normal day.
“By my first cup I’ll be groggy, even if I have slept more than eight hours before,” says MacLean. “So I just have to pound ’er back. Constantly.”
MacLean says if she doesn’t get her coffee fix she suffers from mood swings and can get migraine-like headaches. Her “second nature” takes over and she pours another cup of coffee.
Weaver says the withdrawal symptoms happen because drinkers are addicted to the stimulation. Caffeine activates the release of stimulatory chemicals like adrenaline to wake us up. When we stop drinking coffee, our body resets to low levels of stimulation and calls out for another kick through irritability and headaches.
“The body isn’t happy for the first little while but it gets through it,” says Weaver.
MacLean has tried to cut back on coffee in the past but has never decided to drop it completely. She says there would be a long adjustment period if she tried to limit her intake to a couple of cups.
“I’m so dependent on it now that if I don’t have it I won’t be as alert and I’ll be cranky.”
Jody MacDonald, owner of Vitasential Nutrition in Halifax, says many of her clients have found increased alertness and sustained energy throughout the day once they cut caffeine out of their lives and change their diet.
“They notice that by drinking more water, getting better sleep and eating a better diet that they didn’t really need the coffee after all,” says MacDonald.
MacDonald is a registered holistic nutritional consultant, which means she focuses on providing a natural diet of organic foods for her clients. She says more than half of her 60 clients were addicted to coffee, but most of them have quit drinking coffee after taking her 28-day cleansing program. During this period, MacDonald cuts all unhealthy foods and drinks from her client’s diets and replaces them with whole, raw foods the way nature intended.
MacDonald says it is difficult for her clients to quit drinking coffee at first, but she tries to get them prepared for the withdrawal symptoms. Instead of coffee, MacDonald suggests a switch to a herbal tea to replace the need for a hot beverage. If her clients are still looking for a kick in the morning, she says a shot of cacao in a smoothie can replace the jolt of caffeine.
“I find that if you give people something else to look forward to then they don’t notice the need for coffee as badly,” says MacDonald, who was addicted to coffee until she realized she was pregnant with her first child 12 years ago.
MacDonald’s concern about coffee is the physiological effects of caffeine on the body. Canadians get about 60 per cent of their caffeine from coffee, according to Health Canada. They recommend that adults limit their intake to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day, but each cup of coffee has about 135 milligrams of caffeine. That means people who have more than three cups a day are susceptible to increasing their muscle tension, heart rate and blood sugar.
“If people understood what it was doing to their body and if they could see how much better they could function without it, then maybe they would make the change from it,” says MacDonald.
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