Hey everyone, welcome to Explain Lifetime 5, or ELI 5 for short, the podcast where we take the questions you always want to ask and talk about them in a way that's easy to understand. We are your hosts, I'm Tim. Hey everyone, I'm Kevin. So Kevin, today's topic is caffeine, and specifically the question of why it's the case that caffeine has almost no calories, but it seems to give us a burst of energy on its own.
Where does one's body get this energy from? That's a really good question, Tim. So, you know, I'm a pretty big coffee freak myself, so I dive deep into this and found out how it works. So caffeine primarily works in two ways to give you energy.
First, it prevents the brain from actually telling you you're tired. So here's an analogy. Think of your brain as a bunch of boxes with things in them. Some of these boxes have things that make you happy, some that make you sad, and there's actually one box that tells you it's time to go to sleep.
What caffeine does here is that it seals the lock on the sleep box, so your brain can't even open it. That's how it works to keep you from feeling tired. Okay, got it. So a lock on a sleep box.
That makes sense. You said this was the first way. What's the other way? Yeah, so caffeine also helps open the box that tells your body to go to extra energy mode.
You know, things like making your heart work faster. Caffeine can actually trick your body to thinking it needs more energy than it does. So caffeine doesn't actually create this energy. The body is just using what it has stored more quickly.
It's not really any different than stepping on the gas in your car. You're just telling it to burn more fuel and go faster. Wait, so if I drink a bunch of coffee, then I can speed up my metabolism? Yeah, yeah.
So it's kind of why most weight loss drugs and diet pills actually contain a little bit of caffeine. It acts to suppress the appetite and burn some calories. But that said, keep in mind the difference between a slow metabolism and a fast one is only about like 200 calories per day. So don't expect it to be a really efficient weight loss strategy.
So that being the case, could I take caffeine regularly to lose weight, or would that be dangerous? Yeah, so a lot of bodybuilders actually use this thing called epigen and caffeine together to aid in weight loss. But it can be really dangerous because, I mean, using any drugs in extreme cases are dangerous. In this case, it actually elevates the heart rate really high.
But if you take it in moderation, it does work to a degree. So how about the people who I know who say that caffeine doesn't do much at all? Like those people who say they can drink several cups of coffee a day and still feel tired? Yeah, yeah.
So tolerance is a really big factor here. And there are some genetic factors here as well. You know, your genetics, they influence how much of an effect the stimulant has on your body. Most people fall into the average category.
And in this case, for caffeine, the half-life, or roughly how long it takes for your body to process half of the caffeine, is about five hours. But depending on who you are, you know, some people have a half-life of only half an hour. Some people can have a half-life of 10 hours where caffeine lasts a really long time. That's interesting.
So how about the fact that it's out there that smoking affects the impacts of caffeine? Yeah, yeah. So nicotine can also impact coffee tolerance. So that's why smokers, they drink more with less of an effect.
They just process the caffeine faster. So does this mean that black coffee essentially has negative calories then? Not literally, of course, but in the sense that, you know, if I had a cup of black coffee, there are less calories in that coffee than will be burnt by telling my body to go to extra energy mode? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, when I first found out that the average cup of black coffee has only about like five calories, I mean, I was just shocked to see a nutritional label with a single-digit calorie number on it. So it doesn't surprise me at all that you can drink black coffee and actually burn a little bit more and actually produce a negative calorie effect. Albeit, keep in mind, on a 2,000 calorie diet per day, you know, a couple of calories you burn are not making that much of a difference. Well, still, I'm thinking now I could just, you know, drink more coffee to burn more calories and, you know, that would be my diet.
Oh, but don't take it to the extreme, though. Did you hear about what happened to the Keurig coffee maker inventor? No, what happened? So the Keurig coffee maker was invented by this guy named John Silvan, and he actually went to the ER reporting tunnel vision and heart palpitations.
And after a few tests, the doctor, you know, didn't have an idea of what was causing this and asked him, how much coffee do you drink? 10 cups of coffee a day? Not even close. He would apply something like 30 or 40 cups a day.
I didn't see how that's possible. Yeah, yeah, so the doctor diagnosed him with caffeine poisoning. But he's better now, hopefully drinking a moderate amount. Oh, well, that's good.
And a wonderful story to end with. Thanks, Kevin. Send your suggestions to future Eli5 episodes at Eli5thepodcast.gmail.com. And if you like what you heard, please subscribe to our channel.
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