Caffeine - Do I Really Need It? - 017

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. SPEAKER B Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Today we're talking about caffeine. Does it really help with alertness? You might be prized. Are there major problems associated with its consumption? And are there therapies to deal with withdrawal? Stay tuned for the answers. SPEAKER C Healthy Living is a 13 part production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind, and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical health solutions for overall good. SPEAKER B Healthy's claim to fame is its purported ability to increase alertness. Some people say they need caffeine just to function properly. Let's see what my guest, Dr. Eddie Ramirez has to say about that. Welcome, Eddie. SPEAKER D Thank you. SPEAKER B And what do you have to say about that claim of caffeine actually increasing alertness? Is that a good claim? SPEAKER D There was a very good, well designed study from Bristol University in the United Kingdom in which they had almost 400 participants. And what they did, they started to measure their levels of alertness and the different effects that caffeine was having in them. And what they found was shocking. They found out that these people actually created tolerance to the effects of caffeine. So the researchers reported in the research paper that caffeine drinkers, they're drinking the caffeine not because it makes them alert, but because it makes them feel normal. See, as the effects of the caffeine withdraw during the day, you can see here on the screen how the people that were feeling normal, that were not drinking caffeine continued to feel normal the whole day. The caffeine drinker at the beginning that you see on the left side of your graphic, you see that they did not feel good and not until they drank coffee, they felt alert and normal. Quote, quote. So this study teaches us that you don't need to drink caffeine to feel alert. And another interesting point, the researchers in the publication reported that the withdrawal symptoms of caffeine were similar to having chemotherapy in your body. That sounds terrible. So the reason why you are drinking coffee and you think, well, I need it for the morning, you know, unconsciously that if you don't drink that coffee, you're going to have those severe side effects inside of you. That's why you drink coffee and not because it makes you alert, it just makes you feel normal. Well, if you didn't drink it, you would be normal all the time. SPEAKER B So what she's saying is, okay, normal people are normal all the time. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B Coffee drinkers are only at that level of alertness when they drink the coffee and then they know it. But if they didn't drink it, they would feel at that high level all day. I don't know if that's going to be good news for a lot of people because I think it's fairly addictive as well, isn't it? Yes. SPEAKER D And in the world I move on in the medical world, you go to the hospital and you will see many doctors with their cup of coffee. I don't drink coffee. And you know, I remember years ago when I was in in medical school, I was in this inhumane duties of 36 hours continuously in the hospital and I can tell you I would do those 36 hours without a single drop of coffee. I did not needed that because I knew the side effects of it. As I tell my patients, I don't want to be a hypocrite. If I'm telling you something is because I'm putting that in my life. Where would the conviction comes from if I was not doing that? When I tell my patient you do exercise, it's because I do exercise. SPEAKER B And look, I was very impressed this morning, very early there you were out in the weather and doing your running. So that was very good. You are a very good example of what you tell us to do. SPEAKER D There are many sources today of caffeine. SPEAKER B Yes. It seems to be just popping up everywhere and many people may not be. SPEAKER D Aware of their intake of the caffeine. SPEAKER B Yes. I mean, things that don't ordinarily it's just not there in the drink to start with. It's actually added. Is that to make it an addictive drink? SPEAKER D Absolutely. Caffeine is one of the most addictive things that you can find. You can see on screen some of the common sources, such as coffee, tea, soft drinks, chocolate and even some pain relievers may have some caffeine. SPEAKER B All right, so soft drinks didn't always some of them did, but some soft drinks didn't always have caffeine, did they? Or not as much. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B And that's just been an ad. SPEAKER D And it also depends. Some people think, well, only the black ones have caffeine. Not necessarily. There are some clear ones that have caffeine. So I encourage my patients go ahead and read labels. When you read the label, then you will see if it has caffeine. Another very common source are the famous energy drinks that they call them. See, I have seen even people going to the Er from drinking these types of drinks so much caffeine Er is the emergency the emergency department of the hospital. Of the hospital. So these things are not only bad for the mind, but actually can be dangerous, literally. SPEAKER B What else? What other bad effects are there from drinking? SPEAKER D There was a very interesting study done by Loma Linda University a few years ago. What they did, they had a spider and this poor spider received a dose adjusted level of what you would drink of two cups of caffeine, of coffee. That amount of coffee, of course, adjusted to the weight of the spider. And you know, they put this spider to do its normal web. It couldn't do it. It just made a mess on that web. It took 96 hours for the caffeine to go out of the system, and then the spider was able to make its proper web. Now, you may be saying, well, but I'm not a spider. Yes, I know you're not a spider, but in the same way that you have a nervous system, spiders have nervous system. And the way that caffeine interferes with your nervous system, it also interferes with the nervous system of the spider. SPEAKER B And I'm just trying to do the mental arithmetic. That must be around about four days, it was. Is that right? SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B For it to be able to function normally in its mind, that's not something that I think any of us want to see happen. Yes, we want to be able to function well. SPEAKER D And we have something that would be equivalent to the brakes. When you are talking to somebody and you shouldn't be saying something, there's some breaks in your brain that says, wait, don't say that. Well, there's research actually that shows that if you have coughing on board, you have higher risk of gossiping. I don't know if you guys have that problem here in Australia of no, no. You're actually at higher risk of gossiping, of saying something you should not say, or you're not part of that solution. SPEAKER B Wow. So how does that work? SPEAKER D The reason why that happens is because the brakes in your head, when you are under the effects of caffeine, you are removing the brakes. Let me ask you, like the brakes. SPEAKER B In a car, would you get on. SPEAKER D The car without brakes? SPEAKER B Yeah. Okay. SPEAKER D Many people, that's the first thing they do as they wake up, they take away their brakes. You wouldn't drive a car without brakes. No, there are many people that remove the brakes from their head first thing. And something that is confusing to many people is that there's research that may show certain benefits from caffeine. SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER D And you need to be careful. Sometimes certain research I do lots of research, and sometimes certain research has an agenda. And whenever I read a scientific paper, I always like to see who is sponsoring this. And you will see that many of this good news about caffeine type of studies are sponsored by the industries that have links to coffee or soft drinks or so forth industries. So people like to hear good news about their bad habits. That's the reason why something comes up. SPEAKER B Man. SPEAKER D You're going to read it in the newspaper, on the Internet, you're going to see it on the television. Yet I've seen, because I read a lot of research, that sometimes another paper came at the same time talking about the negative effects of caffeine and so forth. You don't hear absolutely anything about it. SPEAKER B That's really bad, isn't it? Really, really bad. I remember going back some years, I was in the country, in Western Australia, living there. And I went to Sydney for a conference and I thought, oh, on the way back I'll get a mammogram. So I booked in at short notice. And when I was preparing to do that, they said, oh, you're not supposed to have had coffee for 48 hours before having the mammogram. And I said, oh, not a problem, I haven't had any for 48 years because I was 48 at the time. But I was puzzled about that. And so when it was all over, I said, look, I'm just curious, what's the connection between drinking coffee and having a mammogram? And they said, oh, well, a lot of women experience breast pain routinely. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B And when they pull that clamp down, that could make it a lot worse. So I was just intrigued about that. But what they said was that a lot of women, when they go off caffeine or coffee, whatever it is they're using for the 48 hours, the breast pain that they've been having for years isn't there anymore. SPEAKER D My own wife, she used to drink a lot of soda pop and the black type with cola. And she had this tremendous pain in her breast. And not only that, little cysts started to come about. She goes to the doctor. The doctor identifies some of those cysts and she asks her about her habits. This is before we got married. And she says the amount of soda that she was drinking, more than twelve cans per week. SPEAKER B Okay? SPEAKER D The doctor says, you have to stop drinking that soda. She stopped, pain, went away. SPEAKER B Who wants to live with pain? I mean, that's a good thing to know. I hope it's going to be hope it's going to be helping some people out there. I know when you really love something, it's hard to think about not having it, but I guess you weigh up. SPEAKER D So also it affects many systems and people don't realize that. For example, the stomach is something that suffers very much every time you drink caffeine. When you are drinking caffeine, you are actually creating problems with some little doors. You have some little doors that are called sphincters in your stomach. And those little doors are supposed to close when there's food, so digestion can take place properly. But see, when you are drinking caffeine, any type of any source of caffeine, those little doors starts to malfunction. So they may open. And when you're doing digestion, it's like a little washing machine. It moves quite a bit, the food and so forth. So as it's doing that mechanical work, the acid from the stomach starts coming up and things like heartburn and this type of problems, the person stops drinking caffeine and many people get beneficial effects from it. Not only the little doors problem, but also ulcers. We know very well you are at higher risk of having a Stomachal ulcer if you are a regular caffeine drinker and also the brain. If you want to see this with your own eyes, visit my page, Dr. Eddyramirez.com. There I have a video that shows how just drinking one cup of caffeine will decrease your blood flow in 40% in your brain. SPEAKER B 40%? SPEAKER D 40%. This is measure with a functional MRI so you have the before and the after. You can go and see it with your own eyes. This is a clip from a news and this is not good. See, for the health brain, you want to have as much blood flow as possible, not decrease the blood flow. SPEAKER B That's a very powerful finding. I'm just pretty shocked actually, because that's almost half of the oxygen that's meant to be. Absolutely. SPEAKER D That's the reason why when you are under the effects of caffeine, you may do things maybe a little bit faster, but you commit the double errors. So especially if you're like a university student, high school student, that's the last thing you want in your system before your test. Because why would you want to decrease the blood flow to your brain? And especially the frontal lobe? The frontal lobe is when you evaluate if something is correct or not correct. Here you are on a test asking you a question, multiple answers. They're trying to trick you and you don't know which one you're going to choose. And then you decrease the blood flow. It's even worse and you're going to be at higher risk of choosing the wrong answer. SPEAKER B And it's not just students and not just people being tested. It's just our everyday life. We need to have everything going for us to be able to make good decisions and function. SPEAKER D That's right. Another problem also is with females and especially bone health. This is something very well published, very well researched. We know that when you are drinking coffee, you are actually throwing away the calcium from your bones. And you know, here in Australia, osteoporosis is a huge problem. SPEAKER B Yes, it is. SPEAKER D And why put more gasoline on the it? You know, don't damage your bones. So when you are drinking coffee, there's even studies that show that young girls, when they drink coffee, the risk of fracture increases. Even at the young age? SPEAKER B Even at the young age. That's really bad because normally your bones are strengthening while you're at young. SPEAKER D That's exactly what you're supposed to be doing. Before you get to menopause, you want to make sure you have the strongest bones possible. Very good point. SPEAKER B Well, I just hope this is going down well with our people tuning in because there must be some ways that we can deal with this or I mean, I guess people get withdrawals if they do. SPEAKER D Let me give you the plan I share with my patients. But let me just mention two more things. Coffee will also throw away your vitamin B, six and iron in your body. I tell them that this is the contradictory drug I have people that come for consultations and they ask me, Doctor, can I get a supplement of vitamin B six? Can I get some iron? Can I get some calcium? And then I ask them, do you drink coffee? Well, yes. Here they are drinking something they're going to throw away. There is no need for this to happen. So what strategy are we going to use to conquer the problem of caffeine? SPEAKER B Well, what do you tell your patients? SPEAKER D Well, number one, I tell them that they would benefit from some simple hydrotherapy. And hydrotherapy is the use of water in a wise way. So what I want you to do, if you want to conquer caffeine usage, you make sure that you are starting your day with a nice hot shower. Three minutes followed by 1 minute. Okay? 1 minute, 1 minute cold, three minutes hot, 1 minute cold. And you're going to do this two or three times. SPEAKER B How cold are we talking about? SPEAKER D The younger you are, the higher the contrast. So please use common sense. If you are a little bit more advanced in age, that contrast shouldn't be that much. What you're doing with this? I call this the vegetarian coffee. It will wake you up. You don't need a coffee to make yourself alert. So instead of grabbing your coffee, you start your day with this tip, that hot shower followed by cold. If you're having some troubles with nervousness and so forth, I'm going to give you two strategies. You can see them on screen. You can go into a neutral temperature bathtub. It's not hot, it's not cold. It's about the temperature of your body that relaxes the nerves. Or number two, you want to put some ice in the back of your head, and that actually helps relieve many of the headache problems. Okay? SPEAKER B Okay. SPEAKER D So hydrotherapy number two, what you can do, you can eat a good, healthy breakfast. Many people eat too much in the evening and the stomach is tired. He's been working the whole night. So the morning comes and he says, you know, forget it. No more food. So you're not hungry because your stomach has been working hard the whole night. SPEAKER B This is a big problem in Australia. A lot of people skip breakfast. Children skip breakfast. Many, many people. And of course, then what happens is, as the day wears into the mid morning, they're hungry and they eat. But it's not usually something that you would eat at a meal. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B You won't talk about what it is. It's not healthy. SPEAKER D It's as if, starting to drive towards Brisbane, what do you do? The first thing you do, you fill in the gasoline tank. Then you go with the proper amount of petrol. But you're starting the day. Why not put some good high octane type of quality of food, plant based diet with whole grains, maybe some legumes and something that tastes good, that fills you up. It should be the biggest meal of the day? SPEAKER B Do you know? Whenever I ask groups, I say what's the most important meal of the day? And you get a chorus breakfast, everybody knows, but I don't know the figure. But it could be somewhere around a third of Australians somewhere there, I think, who don't actually eat it. We know, but we don't do it. And you've just really put your finger on why that is. Because of that big evening meal and your poor stomachs. By morning it's feeling like it's my turn for a rest. I've been working all night while you've been sleeping and so that's where you have to start, is it? SPEAKER D And it's not only bad habit, it's actually bad for your health. You actually can end up with something like reflux in your stomach every night. Because as you lay down with the stomach full, when you lay down, you push that upper door that I was mentioning, the acid comes up, it burns there. And you can actually get yourself a cancer in the esophagus if you burn night after night after night. That so what you need to do 3 hours before going to bed should be your last meal. Another point, avoid tobacco, you can even see it in their name. Cafe in Nicotine they are actually close cousins, those two substances and one calls for the other one. So if you are drinking coffee, you may be calling for that nicotine. So what I recommend my patients let's tackle both at the same time. So both of them, they need to go away. There's a program that has been offered here in Australia, breed Freely. SPEAKER B Yes, I've seen some of that. Excellent. SPEAKER D It's an excellent program. I would recommend it to anybody that wants to quit smoking. Just google where in your close location is that program being offered? And also make sure that you are drinking enough water. This is a huge problem. We could just talk about this for a long time. But let me tell you this when a patient comes to the hospital, we always have the we have to measure their liquids and so forth. And nurses do some mathematics to make sure that the patient is having enough liquids in them and so forth. And I can tell you, many people don't have enough liquids on board. They drink all kinds of things except water. So when you are going to start doing higher water intake, the water is going to help cleanse the system. How do you know you have enough water on board? Watch your urine needs to be clear and without smell. SPEAKER B Yes, and it's interesting I think caffeine, coffee and so on, they actually dehydrate, don't they? SPEAKER D Absolutely. You take away more water than what you put. So some people say okay, you're taking away my coffee, what am I going to do? Well, why don't you switch that for a herbal tea without caffeine we don't have the time. But there's some major issues both with black tea and green tea. I know this is an inheritance that the British gave you here. It is tradition and so forth, but the caffeine content is not good for you. The green tea, I've seen that with my own eyes. In Africa, before you harvest green tea, you hit the plant with a stick. The reason why you do that, you want to make the plant angry. It releases all kinds of toxic substances and then you harvest, see, if you hit that plant and you bring a goat, the goat wouldn't eat that plant because when it tastes, it says, this is bad, I don't want this yet. What do we do as humans? We pick it up and make a tea out of it. Do not do that. You are consuming very toxic substances. Yes, there's a few antioxidants there, but that does not justify the negative effects that it will have. SPEAKER B They talk about goats being silly, but seems like in that case, we're sillier than the goat. SPEAKER D That's right. Next thing I want you to do, I want you to do exercise. See? Substitute the coffee habit by a good morning walk. That morning invigorating walk will help you start the day with the right leg. And when you are doing your exercise, I want you to be thankful. I want you to think of positive things. I want you to start the day in the proper way and it will give you that energy, it will open your appetite so you can come home and eat your good breakfast. Then you go to the activity of the day. SPEAKER B Yes. Oh, that sounds a really good lineup of things to do and that's been really very helpful. SPEAKER D One last one. I want to give you a Bible promise and that Bible promise is found in Jeremiah 32 27. It says, I am God of all flesh. Is there anything too hard for me? For God? There are no. Impossibles. SPEAKER B That's beautiful. And it's really important, I think, whenever. I mean, change is really a challenging thing and it's very useful to tap into spiritual resources when we're going to make any changes. There's two laws of change. One is change is inevitable and change will be resisted. SPEAKER D That's right. SPEAKER B I don't know how people out there are feeling about what we've been hearing. Certainly you've given us a lot of good reasons to avoid caffeine and you've given us a lot of good strategies how to deal with that and the side effects. So I hope that's been very helpful for you. And you can watch our programs on demand. If you want to visit our website at 3abnaustralia.org.au and just click on the watch button. We hope you'll join us next time as we discuss more secrets of healthy living. SPEAKER C You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia television.