How Coffee Impacts Your Body

Yesterday the subject of my post was 10 Commandments for Bloggers and one of commandments was to write something that can be interesting for many people. As a cup of just prepared coffee was steaming at my table I decided to investigate and share some information about coffee’s impact on our bodies. This should be interesting to a crowd of coffee drinkers I know.

I can’t count how many cups of coffee I’ve consumed in my life but I am pretty sure the number would be quite impressive so it may be better not to count at all.
No matter how it is prepared the essence of the coffee is the caffeine substance:

This substance is well described in this Wikipedia article so I will add here only some extra info.
First of all, caffeine is widespread in nature, there are ~ 60 plants containing caffeine in different amounts. The reason for plants to employ some caffeine is not that they want to stay alert at nights , they need it for protection against cerrtain insects. So in the world of plants caffeine is a protective measure, a killing tool.

One of interesting facts is a relationship between smoking and drinking coffee. Smoking decreases the half-life of caffeine in the body. Not surprisingly smokers usually consume much more coffee.

A comparatively minor effect of caffeine is increase of lipolysis rate. For people with excessive weight this may sound like very good thing but the effect is minor in its value.

The primary effect of the caffeine resides in the plane of neurotransmitters and their role in our central nervous system. This mechanism is always a base of any drug impact mechanism.
Caffeine is the adenosine receptors antagonist.  What this means in simple language is: in every tissue of a human body there is always some amount of adenosine sensitive receptors. Central nervous system continuously releases some amount of adenosine to regulate certain parameters of your body and those receptors react on this. This is well-tuned mechanism which is knocked out by a cup of coffee.
Caffeine molecules bind to receptors and normal adenosine molecules are no longer able to communicate the message they were released into the blood stream for.
A concrete example: suppose for some reasons your blood pressure has increased. Your brain has detected this and is trying to dilate blood vessels by releasing some adenosine into the bloodstream. But an hour before you have drunk a cup of coffee and half of your receptors are already busy with caffeine molecules So you body needs to produce more adenosine than normally required to reach the needed effect.

This is only a half of the problem. The other side, like with any other drug, is phenomenon of tolerance. A week of moderate coffee consumption can establish almost full tolerance to caffeine. This means that your body adapts to the antagonist effect of caffeine. How it that possible? Very simple: your body develops more adenosine receptors to achieve higher sensitivity.

This could be so-so ok if not well-known drug withdrawal effect: once you stop drinking coffee its adenosine inhibitory effect stops as well and it appears that there are too much adenosine receptors in your body. And again your body needs to adapt by some means because messages communicated by adenosine are taken “too seriously” this time

The conclusion is trivia: be careful with coffee. The logic tells to stop drinking it at all but coffee is deeply rooted in culture, society, customs, etc. so it’s not that easy to be pragmatic here.

Every person chooses the health model differently, not always optimally. After processing all this info I will think more to decide should I continue drinking coffee.

Take care.

How To Control A Continuum

I’ve been thinking many times why a human body, my body in particular, is so encapsulated and acts completely like what we used to call a Black Box in software engeneering. I can only see what my eyes can see, I can only touch what my skin can touch. That’s all. We do know alot how our body is constructed inside, how those parts are interconnected between themselves but there is one major drawback: this knowledge doesn’ t help us to feel, control and change our body functions.

I am not able to change the rythm of my heart precisely, I am not able to measure the number red blood cells in my blood as well as not able to detect which cells are infected by some virus, not even talking about fact that I can’t “feel” my cells. That would listen as a trivia if not one thing: body does possess means of measurement and control for each cell, each parameter and actually controls and measures.

The answer hides partially in the field of big numbers. There are ~10 billions red blood cells for example in each liter of my blood or ~ 4 millions of cells in each square inch of my skin. If my conscious was exposed to some signals about state of each of those cells I would end up in total collapse caused by this information. Just try how “easy” for you will be to quickly count the English alphabet from the end to beginning. This is very easy task comparing to “seeing” whether each of 4 million cells is live or dead but still you will most likely stumble on it

The conclusion is that only a small part of your CPU time is dedicated to your conscious needs and operations. The remainder (I believe more than 90%) is not available to average human.

There are ways of trying to learn some simple basic things on how to expand your consious control and intrusion into your black box. These techniques are not taught at schools, they can’t be described by formulas and rules. They are continuos work on yourself, like phisycal exercises, yoga, meditation, reflection, relaxation. I deeply believe in possibility of opening the black box cover and looking inside, this just requires a lot of work, not easy but interesting and very useful.

P.S. Almost forgot about one great thought that I have just clearly embraced: when doing anything you better need to not feel yourself as just you, a thing in itself, but think about you as some object at which you can look from aside. At least try to think in this way about your body. I try to do this as much often as I can and it gives me possibility to partially see myself like others people see me or like I see others people.

Ashtrays, wineglasses and neurotransmitters :)

If you ask most of your friends have they ever tried some drugs you’ll definitely get the “No” answer. But that would not mean really “No”. It would be rather unaware “yes” because alcohol and cigarettes are the same drugs as any MDMA or Speed, just with a lesser level of addiction and side effects. So all that innocent boys and girls are just one step behind those “experienced” who tried hemp and they are in their turn one step behind those more experienced.

I’ve always been interested in how brain works, and not only brain but the whole body. And one interesting thing that I was searching for in all those Wikis some time ago is the explanation of principles of different drugs influence. Today I’ve found in my LiveJournal feed this link. It describes in very simple but still comprehensive form the basics of all that stuff.

It appears that Jellinek was one of the Componence customers some time ago. Tom told me that Jellinek is “an institute that prevents and helps people stopping with addictions but they are a bit too focused on prevention so they think you are an alcoholic if you drink more than 2 beers”. Anyway, they’ve done a good job by creating that fancy animated site.

You may wonder why I have spent some 10 minutes of my time to create this post. I’ve just thought how weird are ways of the internet: you encounter a link in some of your friends live journal, you open it and reads a story, you place a link in your blog, other people can read it and it appears that that company is related to some other company where you were doing some job and in some other 10 minutes you get a lot of new info and understand more then average. I think that is cool and that is the power of the Network.