Caffeine Elimination

Do you ever just wake up in the morning and have a taste for a large Dunkin Donut medium iced caramel coffee with sugar and whipped cream with a donut on the side? You might have answered yes to this question but do you ever think about how much caffeine is going into your body? Everyday we go to the coffee shop or Dunkin Donuts and get our nice warm coffee that we enjoy the most and we slug down all of those sugars and other added sugars down our throat and into our body. Maybe we need the coffee for a kick start for the day or maybe we stayed up all night doing homework and we don’t want to be tired for our morning class that we might fall asleep in causing us to be sleep through the whole class period. So we drink the coffee for the energy and the pleasant feeling we get from the coffee.

Caffeine, a stimulant that act in ways that can do good and bad to the body. But do we know all the effects that caffeine can do to the body? If a person consumes 32 to 200 mgs of caffeine it acts a minor stimulants that might just speed up your normal ways in getting through the morning. But if a person consumes more than 300 mg of caffeine it produces a temporary insomnia (trouble in falling asleep) and 480 mg consumed will cause panic attacks for patients with a panic disorders. These effects can be life changing in not knowing when you will have a panic attack or realizing that you can’t go to sleep until you’re up all night just looking at your ceiling trying to fall asleep. Studies show that ¨13 percent of caffeine in the body is eliminated each hour.¨

Over the past weeks in Mrs.Sallo Algebra 2 class we have been studying exponential functions; functions including with a starting point and a decaying/increasing factor. The project that was presented to us was the Caffeine Elimination project in studying yourself or someone that drinks anything with caffeine. I studied my grandmother’s caffeine consumption over 3 days in her drinking sodas such Mountain Dew and Pepsi. The Mountain Dew bottle consumed of 4.50 mgs and the Pepsi bottle consumed of 37.2 mgs of caffeine.