I’ve been to many quaint coffee shops in my life.  In addition, like many eighteen year old girls, I’ve had plenty of visits to the local Starbucks just fifteen minutes away from my house.  Yet, after only a few weeks at University Park, I feel as if i’m surrounded by it.  Every morning I see hundreds of students running to their 8 am class with coffee mugs.  My roommate brews a fresh batch of coffee from the Keurig before all her early morning classes.  Believe it or not, I’ve only had a sip of coffee once in my entire life.  Not only was it my first sip, but most definitely it was my last.

        For the last couples of weeks, I’ve felt  as if I was an outsider looking in due to the fact, that I’ve only once consumed coffee.  Yet a vast majority of my superiors and fellow students consume it many times daily.  So, this blog, is for all the coffee drinkers out there.  This is for the 83 percent of Americans according to USA Today, who drink coffee daily (Republic).  

     As many learn in high school health class, coffee is a stimulant.  According to Dictionary.com, a stimulant is, “something that temporarily quickens some vital process or the functional activity of some organ or part”.  Not only is coffee a stimulant but, it happens to be made up of caffeine.  Steven Meredith from the John Hopkins School of Medicine is a researcher in behavioral pharmacology and he claims that, “Caffeine is a drug”(Coffee For).  Many become addicted to this “drug”, caffeine, without even realizing it.  As Dr. Griffiths from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine said, “Caffeine is the world’s most widely used mind-altering drug,”(Blakeslee).  Dr Griffiths and his colleague, Dr. Eric Strain did an experiment in which they put an advertisement in a local newspaper, looking for those who were reliant on coffee.  The 11 participants ranged from those who, “consumed less caffeine than is found in a single cup of coffee, while one person drank the equivalent of 25 cups of coffee a day” (Blakeslee).  The participants were told that the study was about the “effects on mood and behavior of several compounds normally found in food and beverages” (Blakeslee).  The participants were told to avoid certain foods as well as beverages.  The researchers gave the participants pills.  One was called a dummy pill that was filled with starch.  The other pill however was filled with caffeine.  Those who had the starch pill experienced the following, “One person who had a manufacturing job made costly errors.  Another could not bring herself to go to work.  Another spent the afternoon in a dark office with her head on her desk.  One woman called off her child’s birthday party. Most went to bed early” (Blakeslee).  This study just goes to show that caffeine is one addictive stimulant.  Also, what most people fail to realize is that caffeine,”increases anxiety and disrupts sleep patterns, leading to a vicious cycle of restless sleep”.  In addition, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration caffeine, “makes you more jittery and shaky, as well as increases your heart beat” (Trevor).

On the other hand, researchers have found that there are some benefits of drinking coffee.  The National Institutes of Health (Coffee Drinkers) did a study from 1995 to 2008.  The NIH, “collected questionnaires filled out by 229,119 men and 173,141 women who were members of the American Association of Retired Persons (Coffee For) between 1995 and 1996.  The respondents were followed until 2008, by which point 52,000 had died” (Coffee Drinkers). The researchers found that, “ the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was to die from a number of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections and even injuries and accidents” (Coffee Drinkers). In addition, the study discovered that, “the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day” (Coffee Drinkers).  Another researcher from Sweden, Jingmei Li, states that, “women who drink five or more cups of coffee a day are 57 percent less likely to develop estrogen receptor-negative breast cancer than women who drink less than a cup of coffee a day” (Coffee Habit).  This is due to the fact that according to Mr. Li, “Coffee contains compounds that may differentially affect breast cancer of different estrogen receptor (ER) subtypes” (Coffee Habit).

So maybe one day I’ll decided to drink coffee and join the millions of Americans that already do.

Works Cited:

Blakeslee, Sandra. “Yes, People Are Right. Caffeine Is Addictive.” The New York Times. The

New York Times, 04 Oct. 1994. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

“Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer.” Well Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer Comments. N.p., 16

May 2012. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

“Coffee for Health – Positive and Negative Effects of Caffeine – AARP.”AARP. N.p., n.d. Web. 17

Sept. 2015.

“Coffee Habit May Protect against Breast Cancer.” Msnbc.com. N.p., 11 May 2011. Web. 17

Sept. 2015.