Caffeine

People who miss their daily caffeine fix can plunge into a series of withdrawal symptoms ranging from headaches to moodiness and nausea even if their habits are limited to a cup of coffee or two cans of cola a day, according to Johns Hopkins researchers.Researchers have long recognized that heavy coffee drinkers are subject to withdrawal symptoms when they miss their morning dose. But the recent study at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine observed unpleasant side effects when people with low-caffeine habits were suddenly denied their fix."

Boston -- It was inevitable, she growled to herself, clutching her coffee mug as she read her morning newspaper, waiting for the rich brown liquid to clear away the internal cobwebs, waiting for the fuel to kick another day into gear.For years she had blithely, lightly described coffee as the last drug of the '90s. But it was just a little joke, with just a little truth.After all, the martini had been replaced by bubbling waters from distant caves under Italy and France. Meat had gone the way of all flesh.

Scientists call it 1-3-7 trimethylxanthine, and it is the most widely used psychoactive substance in the world. You probably had it for breakfast.To most of us, it is caffeine. Researchers like Dr. Roland Griffiths, professor of psychiatry and neurosciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, are particularly interested in how caffeine affects our bodies and behavior.Q: What are the usual dietary sources of caffeine?A: It is a substance found naturally in coffee, tea and cocoa products.

You really blew it in your response to a person concerned about the health effects of chocolate. You said there's no caffeine in chocolate. My doctor told me to stay away from coffee and chocolate because caffeine could throw my heart out of rhythm. Last year I developed an abnormal heart rhythm and had to be electrically shocked to get back into normal rhythm. I'm avoiding caffeine since I don't want to go through that again. We may have overstated the case. As we specified, the primary ingredient in chocolate is theobromine, a compound related to caffeine.

Giving up coffee for better health was a real challenge for me. I can't tolerate decaf, so substituting was out. But stopping caffeine gave me migraines. Irritability and the threat of migraines gave me the perfect excuse to drink coffee (which is really what I wanted to do). Here's my solution: I quit drinking coffee and bought a bottle of caffeine tablets. I cut them into quarters, with each one equal to about a half-cup of coffee. Whenever I got a withdrawal twinge, I took a half-cup dose.

Coffee has taken its share of lumps in recent years, but grounds for concern about coffee's apparent relationship with heart disease have shifted drastically.Caffeine used to be considered the culprit, but caffeine may now be in the clear as de-caf, once the wise alternative, has come under suspicion.The latest wisdom appeared last Thursday: Based on a study of 45,589 male medical professionals, Harvard researchers reported that up to six cups of caffeinated coffee per day had no ill effects in the heart or coronary arteries.

Kathy Rossiter was feeling the early twinges of labor several years ago when she confronted the unthinkable: no more Mountain Dew in the house. Even though her baby was on the way, she feared caffeine withdrawal, so she rushed to the grocery store and bought two six-packs.This didn't seem an extreme measure to feed a caffeine habit until she was standing at the cashier's counter, labor pains mounting while she waited her turn to pay."People were looking at me askance," said Ms. Rossiter, 38, a nurse who lives in Fullerton.

The University of Minnesota is among the few institutions in the world to be looking specifically at the effects caffeine has on children. In a lab at the university, 10 monkeys are currently recovering from their $37-a-week Kool-Aid habit that contained the caffeine equivalent of an 8- to 10-year-old drinking two cans of pop a day.To approximate this, controlled amounts of caffeine were added to the tropical punch-flavored drink that was given to the...

Q.Thirty years ago when my daughter was making her first Holy Communion, I had a house full of guests. My head was splitting, and nothing helped. My sister-in-law told me to try a couple aspirins with a cup of coffee. I had tried everything else, so I took her advice. A few hours later she asked me how my headache was, and I realized the pain was gone. That's how I learned to combine aspirin and caffeine. A.Caffeine has been shown to boost pain relief from either aspirin or ibuprofen.

New York -- Over the hectic eight days that make up Fashion Week - which is wrapping up today in New York's Bryant Park - what you eat is almost as important as what you wear. After all, you'll need enough calories to get you from the Lacoste show at 10 a.m. to the Ralph Lauren show at 8:30 p.m., and back up again for the DKNY show the next morning. And yet, for the fashion-obsessed, there's always the worry about fitting into next season's slinky sarong. "Everybody's like `caffeine, caffeine,' " says Anastasia Wylie, 23, who was waiting under the tents with two friends one day last week to get into the Temperley London presentation.