If you love coffee, chances are you crave it pretty much every day. More than half of Americans consume more than 300 milligrams of caffeine per day, which can be equivalent to about three cups of coffee. But while the collective love for coffee is mostly fun, the consequences of being addicted to caffeine can do more harm than good.
Coffee is an addiction.
It’s not bad to drink coffee, and that’s not the point that’s trying to be made here. Drinking coffee becomes a problem when you’re having multiple cups a day, every day. If you need the caffeine intake to function properly or get headaches when you don’t have coffee, you’re probably addicted to it. Whether you like it or not, caffeine is a drug.
If you don’t think that coffee addiction is a problem, think about this: over 40% of Americans would rather give up their entire cell phone than their daily coffee. For something that has now become such an integral part of society, making a sacrifice that large just for coffee is astonishing.
Nobody talks about how unhealthy coffee can be.
Everybody loves to talk about how much sugar is in soda, but nobody seems to consider how much sugar can be in coffee. If you drink your coffee black, this doesn’t apply to you. But, when you order your daily latte with milk, two pumps of mocha, and a bag (or two) of sweetener, it’s likely your coffee has more sugar than a can of soda does.
Consuming that much sugar daily is simply not healthy, and you can’t use your need for caffeine as an excuse to consume that many calories and grams of sugar. At that point, it’s barely even coffee, but rather a glorified milkshake or hot chocolate. Now, don’t stop drinking flavored coffee altogether — it’s fine to have every once in a while. It’s unhealthy when it becomes a daily occurrence.
Despite this, you can still be healthy while consuming coffee — you just need to look at it from a different perspective. The glorification of sugary coffee drinks being disguised as just caffeine is unhealthy for the majority of Americans, and our culture’s obsession with needing as much caffeine as possible creates addiction. As long as you don’t consume too much coffee or sugar, you won’t be contributing to any unhealthy habits. However, as a community, let’s start to treat caffeine seriously.
Have anything to add, thoughts, or concerns? Feel free to leave a comment below.
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A quality coffee isn’t bad for you, in fact it’s very healthy for you and your brain provided you aren’t loading it up with sugars, artificial creamers, etc. Polyphenols would be one of the many beneficial chemicals in coffee that one ought to have in his/her diet. If caffeine is causing a problem, you can always drink decaf.
I’m pretty sure the reason that so many people rely on coffee and the associated caffeine is that they use it as a crutch to stay awake all day long. The underlying problem is their diet, likely high in sugar and carbs and not healthy fats, so they need caffeine to offset the crash they get when the come off their donut-induced sugar high.
My wife and I have been drinking bulletproof coffee (coffee + MCT oil + ghee) as a breakfast replacement combined with a healthy diet and we have no intention of stopping. Neither one of us get “the jitters” and neither of us get headaches when we don’t have our coffee.
If you haven’t tried bulletproof coffee, you must… at least once. Note that one cup can contain ~400 calories, hence the reason it is a breakfast replacement, not a supplement unless you want to put on weight!