Teenagers have a real fascination with caffeine, and it seems to only just get worse when they enter high school. Caffeine-filled drinks in recent years have started to be sold in school vending machines for easy access to kids during the day. But is this a good thing?
The Effects of Caffeine
Some students have a strong belief that they need caffeine to survive throughout the day and have made it a habit to do so, but would be surprised to find out that it can be a pretty big danger and could be affecting them significantly. Caffeine has been proven to cause dehydration, heart complications, anxiety, and trouble with sleeping. Signs that you’ve had too much of it are restlessness, shakiness, irregular or abnormal fast heartbeats, headaches, and irritability. And when you take in caffeine to your system it may not completely clear your bloodstream until after 10 whole hours.
Is Caffeine Having a Positive or Negative Impact on Students?
When I made these observations I started to just see more and more energy booster drinks so I interviewed some students to see what their take on caffeine is.
“I spend about $20 a week per box of coffee at Krogers” says Trezure Jhonson a Sophomore here at Lakota West. That is a lot of coffee in just a week.
“I drink around 1 caffeinated drink a week, so I do not feel much of an effect at all because I don’t intake much” says another Sophomore Jazmina Hatfield.
School can already be overwhelming enough but by cutting out or drinking less caffeine it might just help you prevent some of those nerves and jitters.
The Benefits of Cutting out Caffeine.
In the study, published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers found that coffee drinkers were between 10 and 15% less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers. Overall caffeine-filled drinks are nice to have every once in a while to treat yourself, it is not something that should be placed as a habit in our daily lives.
Olivia • Mar 13, 2024 at 10:12 am
This is a really good article and was very helpful!