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ADHD Experts Podcast
544- ADHD and Caffeine: Risks & Benefits of Using This Natural Stimulant
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Caffeine is almost universally seen as an antidote to memory, fatigue, and focus problems, but may affect heart rate and sleep. Sarah Cheyette, M.D., discusses research on caffeine and ADHD, and the risks and benefits of consuming this natural...
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary.
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Not available in all states.
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Welcome to the Attention Deficit Disorder Expert Podcast series by Attitude Magazine.
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Hello, my name is Nicole Carr and on behalf of the Attitude Team, I'm pleased to welcome you to today's ADHD Experts presentation titled ADHD and Risks and Benefits of Using this Natural Stimulant. Leading Today's presentation is Dr. Sarah Shayette. Dr. Shayette treats children and adults with ADHD with medication and non medication strategies at her private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of several books on ADHD including Winning with ADHD and ADHD and the Focused Mind. For multiple years she has been named a top doctor in San Francisco Magazine. In today's webinar we'll discuss the world's most popular stimulant caffeine. Dr. Shayette will help us understand what caffeine does to the body and how it may impact ADHD symptoms. We'll learn about the risks and benefits of consuming caffeine, especially with ADHD medication, and we'll discuss how caffeine and exercise can work together to address ADHD symptoms. Finally, the sponsor of this webinar is Eccentreated Excentrate delivers personalized brain ready nutrition designed to support focus, emotional balance and overall brain health through a combination of omega 3s, vitamins and minerals. Featuring Lysoveta LPC excentrate omega products offer six times higher absorption than traditional fish oil, ensuring faster, longer lasting benefits to help you perform at your best every day. Visit phenexhealthscience.com to learn more. Attitude thanks our sponsors for supporting our webinars. Sponsorship has no influence on speaker selection or webinar content, so without further ado, I'm so pleased to welcome Dr. Shayette. Thank you so much for joining us today and leading this important discussion.
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Thank you so much for having me and I'm really appreciative to all of you in the audience for tuning in. I think this is going to be a really, really fun webinar. It's not on anything boring, it's on something that probably most of us all know and love. Because you know, caffeine is in our lives in many different places. Whether it's our morning coffee or our afternoon chocolate, we all have interacted with caffeine and we don't really talk about it very much in terms of exactly what it is. So let's jump right in. And the first thing I'm going to ask you guys to think about is, is caffeine the world's most common stimulant medication? And I'm not going to answer that this second, but I'm going to sort of say, well, to answer that question, we got to think about what is a medication. So what did I do? I went to the dictionary, I went to three dictionaries and I looked at medication. It is really non specific. What is a medication? So medication is either the act of medicating or a medicinal substance. That doesn't really help us. Right. So I went to the NIH definition of a medication. And this is a little bit more verbiage here. A medication is a substance that is used to treat, prevent or diagnose disease or to ease symptoms. Medications can be chemical compounds, cellular elements or other substances. They can come in many forms, including tablets, capsules, liquids, creams and patches. So yeah, that's more words. But what this is basically saying is it's anything that has to do with treating or preventing disease and it can come in any form. So, you know, that just sort of says, well, all right then when you think about caffeine in that, you know, within that definition, I would say that caffeine, yes, is the world's most common stimulant medication. It, you know, treats tiredness, it treats lack of focus, it does all those things that we use it for. It definitely has effects on mood, memory, alertness, physical performance and how we think so, although we don't really think of it as a medication, it's as much of a medication as anything that you find in a little bottle from your pharmacy. Let's talk about some fun things about caffeine just so that, you know, we all sort of know what we're talking about. These are the berries where they. This. These are the coffee berries where, where caffeine is a part of them and they grow in the warmer parts of the world. This is what caffeine looks like if you were to go to chemistry class and map it out. It is C8H10N4O2. That makes it sounds more like a medication as well. And the name for it is 137trimethylxanthine. The important part of that word is xanthine because that's the category of molecules. This is. Caffeine's been around for a long time. We think I mean, the, the. The history on this is not really clear. There's huge ranges of dates, but, you know, since before Christ era, know, maybe a thousand years before that, which would make it about 3,000 years ago, the Chinese were drinking tea that had caffeine in it. The story is that a goat herder was at some point around that time noticing that his goats were lively after munching on these certain berries. I don't know if that's true or not. And then Muslims or monks or both learn to dry the fruit and make it into a beverage that helped them stay awake. And this is the origin of our coffee tradition, or tea tradition. It became really popular somewhere between the 14th and the 17th century. So that's when people started to drink it in public and in cafes. The word caffeine is actually an Arabic word from kaweh, which means. Which, you know, we. We use as the word coffee. So those are some fun things. I, I have been recently drinking coffee. I'm. I'm new to coffee drinking. About 10 years ago, I started when my daughter actually moved to Seattle, and I don't know, seemed like a good time to start. But people can find caffeine in other things. Primarily what we do is coffee or tea or chocolate is another one. But there's lots of beverages that also contain caffeine, and they really range. So, you know, when you're talking about any sort of difference between whether you're taking a medicine or taking caffeine from a drink, you can look at these tables and they'll tell you how many milligrams of caffeine is in them. But if you look at enough tables, you can see that there's quite a range. So there's ranges in different Starbucks brews. There are ranges in different green teas or matchas or other things like that. So sometimes something that's labeled decaf might have caffeine in it. Sometimes it has to be labeled caffeine free. These are approximate milligrams of caffeine. When you take a medicine, though, you know exactly what is in the pill, how many milligrams of Adderall, how many milligrams of Ritalin, how many milligrams of whatever else you're taking. So, you know, you can look at these numbers, but know that there is a range. They are approximate. They could be, you know, they could potentially change over time. And what I would say is that that doesn't matter to some people, but if you're very sensitive, that could matter a lot. Let's not forget these energy drinks which are, you know, coffee or more usually in terms of the amount of caffeine in the soda. These are becoming so popular with people. They're a huge industry. Some of them also have tons of sugar in them, but some of them are sugar free. They usually have other things obviously to make them sweet. But there is quite a range of caffeine in all these energy drinks is the point of this slide. Some of them have 80 milligrams, some of them have 200 milligrams or 250 milligrams. Even so, you know, not all energy drinks will give you the same amount of caffeine either. And they may have substances in them that you may be sensitive to. So read your labels. I was really surprised to find out how much caffeine there was in dark chocolate because a lot of people do have some chocolate at nighttime and 12 milligrams of caffeine per ounce taken at night. Usually people eat a couple of ounces at a time. And so, you know, that's not an insignificant amount of caffeine for nighttime. And it, it absolutely can be more caffeine per ounce depending on, you know, how dark the chocolate is. Milk chocolate is less because you're mixing it with milk. And so if you're sensitive to caffeine and you want chocolate at nighttime, looking for something that's a lighter chocolate might be better for your sleep or if you enjoy white chocolate, which actually isn't really considered chocolate at all by many people because it doesn't have the, the cacao in it. That one is completely caffeine free.
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Let'S talk about the metabolism of caffeine. You know, whatever you put in your mouth is generally very much absorbed by your stomach and your digestive system. So it all the milligrams are going to go into your body. It's metabolized by your liver and the paraxanthine is the name of the enzyme that's not important. The really important thing is that it is metabolized at different rates by different people which we, we kind of know. Like we all know people who can drink like six cups of coffee and be totally fine. And we know people who drink six sips of coffee and are like, wired, right? So what that means is that the people who can drink lots of coffee and not have much effect of it or much side effects from it, those people have a high amount of that paraxanthine enzyme in the liver. So their liver is really, really good at metabolizing caffeine. So it's hard to get much caffeine in their bloodstream because their liver is just, you know, get getting rid of it really fast. The people who are very sensitive to caffeine, their liver enzymes are slow and, you know, a little bit is taken in and their bodies don't break it down very fast. So it's very effective for mostly, like, it works well because it's not being broken down. They may also have more side effects because, again, it's present in their body. This concept of metabolism is true for caffeine. It's true for medications for people. Just like different people are sensitive to different amounts of Adderall because their metabolism of Adderall varies with different enzymes. And we all have our unique combination of enzymes. You know, some people are super sensitive to Adderall, and some people, you could back up the Adderall truck and have them just take a whole bunch of it and they'll be like, what am I taking? Anything? So, and those people have good enzymes for Adderall. And I should say, if you're good at metabolizing one thing, that doesn't mean that you're going to be good at metabolizing another thing. So, for example, I'm a pretty good drinker. I could drink a lot of alcohol and not feel it very much. However, with caffeine, I'm super sensitive. If I have any caffeine after about 10, 30 or 11, I will feel it that night. So everyone metabolizes different things differently. And certainly everyone has their own specific and unique metabolism. Metabolism for caffeine, I will say that people who smoke generally can metabolize caffeine faster. I kind of was looking around and I just was wondering if metabolism of caffeine can change depending on different parts of a woman's cycle. And no, that doesn't seem to be the case. So the big, the big take home from this particular slide is that different people metabolize caffeine differently, so are affected by it differently. How does caffeine work? Kind of an interesting thing, caffeine, you take it in your mouth, it gets absorbed by your stomach. Or GI tract. It goes into your blood, and from your blood it goes to your brain. This is generally how all medications work. And in your brain, it's floating around in your blood, and it may or it will kind of float by some receptors that are on the brain cells called adenosine receptors. What they normally do is they decrease the amount of dopamine that's released in your brain. So what these caffeine molecules do is it blocks these receptors, and so it increases the amount of dopamine release in your brain. So a whole other topic is ADHD and dopamine, and we can't really get into that. But one of the theories of why some people have ADHD is that there's too little dopamine in certain areas of your brain. Dopamine is a super complicated chemical. It's involved in Parkinson's, it's involved in breastfeeding. It's involved in a lot of things. So it's not just a matter of too low dopamine or anything like that. But in certain areas of your brain, in adhd, there may be less than average dopamine release. So the caffeine could be increasing dopamine in those areas. I wish we had better tools to study this. It's hard to study a brain. We can't see those little receptors in living human beings. So, you know, what I'm telling you is a simplified version, a simplified theory. But that's what we think is the way caffeine works. I should also say that the medications for adhd, specifically the stimulant medications like Adderall and Ritalin, also increase the amount of dopamine in certain areas of your brain as well. So caffeine, as we said, goes into your bloodstream. We talked about what happened when it hits your brain. When that blood hits your brain, however, that blood is going all over your body. And so it hits your heart. Right? And so one of the things that happens is heart rate goes up and there's effects on inflammation. There's effects on your kidneys. You know, you kind of have to pee more after caffeine hits your kidneys. So those are some side effects that we're talking about, but that's how the caffeine works. What does it do when it's going around your body? Well, one of the good things is that multiple studies have shown that it increases mental performance on certain tasks and physical endurance. So it seems like with athletes, for example, they kind of are even more coordinated and they're able to do their sports better. Than without caffeine. It's not on all kinds of cognitive tasks, but it does enhance performance on cognitive tasks and some aspects of your mood. So it can make people a little bit more happy for some people. And specifically in terms of the cognitive tasks, it seems to increase the rate at which you can kind of gather information about the outside world and the speed and accuracy of using that information. It definitely helps with the cognitive task of being awake. So, you know that's the most common use of caffeine, right? Because it really helps you be awake. It hits parts of your brain that say, okay, it's daytime, let's turn on. It helps with vigilance. Vigilance is another word, sort of looking around and being aware that things can happen. It is not a, it's not helpful for long term memory. So in terms of cognitive tasks that it does not help, it does not help people remember things from a long time ago. And you know, one of the things that people complain of when they don't get enough sleep is that they can't remember things. You know, when, when you get less sleep than you need, the way your brain functions is worse. And the thing about it is that people always overestimate, you know, how well they underestimate, I should say, the effects on them. So they'll get like six or seven hours of sleep when they need eight, and they'll be like, no, I'm fine, I can do it, I'm great. Or they might do that several nights in a row. But when they take tests of how their brain is thinking and performing, those tests generally show that they're not doing as well as they think they are. So we all fool ourselves is what I'm trying to say regarding the sleep deprivation. And to fix that, sleeping works better than taking your coffee in the morning. So what I'm trying to say is that if you don't get enough sleep, you are probably underestimating how well you are performing. And the way to fix that is to get more sleep. The way to fix things that is not to have more coffee in the morning or to have your coffee in the morning. Coffee has definite side effects. So one of the things that it does is make sleep worse. And that's even for some people, if you take it in the morning. So you can measure caffeine in your bloodstream even if you just had it in the morning, at least for nearly everyone who takes it. But it affects people's sleep, especially if they are slower metabolizers of the caffeine. As I Mentioned before, it increases heart rate and blood pressure as it's floating around in your blood. And that's most often in the first two hours after it's ingested. And I'll say a little bit more about the blood pressure soon. We talked about effects in the brain. So as it's floating around your brain, one of the things it does is increases your anxiety. Some people, I think when it increase their, increases their heart rate, that makes them feel more anxious as well. But sort of everything in your body is kind of a little bit amped up. There have been some studies now this is not well studied, but as recently as this month, there was a study that came out that showed that doses over 100 milligrams per day and that is sort of like a little less than the average coffee. Probably it can worsen kids behavior. People are more irritable, meaner, other things, and that would be in kids and adolescents was that the last study was in adolescents. I think that that's true in adults too. But I'm referring particularly to the study that came out this month, which was in adolescence. It causes headaches for some people. And as a neurologist, which is what I am, so I treat headaches. And one thing I can tell you is that caffeine withdrawal headaches are real like they are really bad for some people. And that means that if you're used to having caffeine every day and you don't have the caffeine, you can get a really raging headache. I had somebody who had been having coffee and also a medication that contained caffeine. She was taking it every day. It was a medicine that was for pain and headaches and she took it for like 30 years. But because the medicine also contained aspirin, she had upcoming surgery and she had to get off the medicine. And she was just absolutely miserable with these headaches. So I can tell you it doesn't usually take 30 years of taking a medicine, but even for some people a couple of weeks. Again, people metabolize this differently. So it could be different amounts of time. But you can get a headache either from direct effects of caffeine when it is in your body or if you suddenly stop taking the caffeine. Also for people, caffeine can cause diarrhea, nausea and vomiting from effects on your GI system. So I mentioned in the slide before that I was going to address blood pressure. One of the things about stimulant medicines that a lot of providers are like, oh my God, we don't want to give you stimulant medicine, because it could raise your blood pressure, which is absolutely true. But when you look it up, on average, stimulant medicines don't raise your blood pressure very much, maybe a few points, three to five points, basically. So if your blood pressure is normally 120 over 80 on the stimulant medicine, it could be 124 over 84 or something like that. When you look up the effects of coffee or caffeine on your blood pressure, it's probably about the same. Now, we're dealing with very few studies and very average numbers. And what matters is not necessarily the average, but it matters for what it, what effects they are on you as an individual. But on average, you know, we should be worrying about caffeine as much as we should be worrying about the stimulant medicines. Of course, some people take both, and we'll get into that in, in a little bit. So, you know, if you take a look at caffeine versus ADHD medications like the stimulants, boy, on paper, they look about the same. They have this alertness factors, they help with attention, they help with. Or they have side effects on your heart rate and blood pressure, and they also have effects on your sleep, negative effects on your sleep. So all of these things, you can't tell whether we're talking about caffeine or stimulant medicines. So then the question gets to be, well, if they're pretty similar, why don't we use caffeine for adhd? And the thing is that it is less specific for the receptors. So it's floating around and it's hitting lots and lots and lots of different receptors in your body. Yes, it does hit your brain and make you more awake and more vigilant or attention attentive. But does that, it does lots of other things too that are side effects that you're not looking for. And it doesn't work as well in your brain as the stimulant medicine. So this, you basically need lots more of the caffeine to get the mental benefits. But with that, you get lots and lots of side effects. So you get effects on your sleep, you get the headaches, you get the negative behavior, the blood pressure, heart rate, feeling kind of anxious. So that's the major difference here. So if you want to kind of visualize it, the stimulant medicines are much more specific and effective for your brain. So you basically are putting all of it in your brain. They have fewer side effects on average. And with the caffeine, while you can get the same effects on your brain, and it has. You need much more of it to equal the stimulant medicines. And with more of it, you get more side effects. So remember that caffeine and stimulant medicines work in different ways. So both of them do achieve some increase in dopamine. But caffeine, as we said earlier, blocks these adenosine receptors. And by doing that, that's how they increase the dopamine. Stimulants tend to block dopamine transporters, and they increase dopamine in a different way, in a way that seems to be more effective for many people. It's not. And here I'm talking about adults in general. Mostly it's the adults that are going to be combining caffeine and ADHD medications. And, you know, I had to learn to ask about this because that's not something that I was really taught when I was prescribing stimulants, was to ask about other things like caffeine. But in the real world, that is a huge issue. I have a lot of people who I give a small dose of Adderall or Ritalin to them, and they have way more than affected side effects or way more than expected side effects, I should say. And some of them can then tolerate the stimulant medications if they reduce or eliminate their caffeine in the morning. And so what we're doing is we're basically, instead of sort of giving a whole thing of coffee and stimulant medicines, we are shifting to the stimulant medicines, which are more specific for the benefits and give fewer side effects per benefit, basically. And that definitely helps your helps some people tolerate their ADHD medicines. Then they're like, well, I can just drink decaf if I'm drinking for the taste. If I'm drinking for the benefits of the caffeine, they might decide to increase the amount of stimulant medicine because they're getting their benefits without as many side effects. So if you are taking ADHD medicines and drinking coffee and having side effects, one way to solve that problem would be to reduce the amount of coffee you take in the morning, or tea, whatever you're taking that has the caffeine or or energy drinks, if you're young and drinking those. But what we want to do is then maybe increase the amount of ADHD medication that you're taking. And that might be your solution. Okay, and I'm going to go back to that last slide for a second, too, and just say, what about the non Stimulant medications. There are non stimulant medications for adhd. The most common ones are Kelbri and Strattera. Strattera has been around for a very long time and Kelbri is a little bit newer, however works very similarly to Strattera. Some people are on clonidine too, but I'm going to get off that. And Wellbutrin is a non stimulant, but it is not FDA approved for adhd. What I want to say about the non stimulant medicines is that they don't work on the dopamine pathways as much as the stimulant medications do. So you probably will have fewer interactions of these medications. So, you know, instead of all piling on the dopamine, you might be piling on some increasing norepinephrine with the non stimulants and the dopamine with the coffee. You know, you probably will have fewer side effects with that combination in terms of things that dopamine can do as a side effect. But you know, the stimulant medicines do tend to be the most widely used and the most effective for adhd. So that's, that's why I sort of focus on combining adhd, stimulant medicines and caffeine. Talk about caffeine and exercise for a minute. So caffeine helps people exercise, it makes their stamina increased, it makes them more able to be sort of coordinated in what they're doing with their exercise. If coordination is a part of your exercise and the, you know, different sports governing bodies have looked at these things. But so whether it's legal or not in a particular sport, I'm not going to get into that. But studies have definitely shown that caffeine helps you physically with exercise. I will also mention that exercise helps with adhd, that's for dang sure. And so what exercise does is it increases certain good substances in your brain like brain derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF, which improves neuron growth, IGF1 and all these things, they improve blood vessel growth, brain cell growth. When I don't feel like exercising, I might kind of think about this. I'm like, oh, you're doing good things for your brain to increase your nerve cell growth and your blood vessel growth ward off dementia. All these things that exercise is supposed to be good for. Exercise also helps people sleep better. So that's a really good thing for ADHD and cognition in general. Exercise is one of the best things you can do to help you with your mood and, you know, it's one of those positive reinforcement cycles. It probably directly affects the brain chemistry effect that is associated with mood, but it also makes people feel accomplished, and that's a good thing for your mood. So, you know, if you wanted to combine caffeine and exercise, both of those things could be really good things for your adhd. But, you know, watch out for the side effects of caffeine. Most people don't need caffeine to exercise. So this has been a really, really interesting topic for me to think about and to learn about and to talk to you guys about. I really have enjoyed, you know, thinking about caffeine, and I think about it a little bit differently. You know, long story short, your body doesn't know the difference between what comes in a cup and what comes in a pill. Just gets into your body and your body reacts to it. So how we think about caffeine may be something that we think differently about after this webinar. But you let me know it's time for me to stop being the talker and start being somebody who takes your questions. So I'm going to hand it back to the moderator, Nicole.
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Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Shayette. That was so illuminating. And we got so, so many questions of all kinds, so I'm excited to get into it. Before we start the Q and A, I'd like to thank Accentrate once more for sponsoring this webinar. And I would also like to share the final results from today's poll questions. So we asked, on average, how many caffeinated beverages do you or your child consume each day? The vast majority of our audience members today say, said one to three cups a day. That was about 84%. And then about 14% said they or their children drink four to six cups a day. A small amount, 2% said seven to nine cups. And just under 1% said they had more than 10 cups. So seems like most of our audience members are drinking about one to three cups a day, a day of whatever their preferred caffeinated beverage is. We also asked if you or your child consumes caffeine in any form, do you notice any effects on their ADHD symptoms or your ADHD symptoms? About half said that caffeine improves my or my child's symptoms. So almost 40% said they do not notice any effect. And then a small amount, 8%, said that caffeine worsens ADHD symptoms for them or their child. So that just gives us some context about the experience of the audience here today. So, yeah, let's get to some of our questions, we had a lot of audience members writing in to say that caffeine maybe count counterintuitively makes them calm and relaxed, actually that it makes them fall asleep. And one viewer asks if you have any thoughts or experiences with this, quote, paradoxical effect of caffeine, and they'd like to know is this common? Is this specific or prevalent among people with adhd? And do you think it's advisable to use caffeine for possible calming properties?
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Well, it's not advisable for most people because for most people it's going to have the opposite effect. But, you know, as a doctor, I kind of wish everybody was all the same, but I kind of like that everyone's also all different. It's kind of a challenge. And what I can tell you specifically as a brain doctor is that different people are going to have different results from different things, whether it is Adderall, Ritalin or caffeine. I'm going to answer the question, but I also want to shift and say that what you guys described, I'll call you the calm people with caffeine. What you described about that is also how some people describe when they have their stimulants right, they feel more calmer, meaning their brain is better able to select one thing to think about as compared to every, you know, other things. And for some people, that's, that's the effect that they get on the stimulants and it makes them feel, ah, good, calm. I can do this. I can settle down and do one thing. And again, caffeine does affect the dopamine, which is also affected by the stimulant medicines. Sure. People who have caffeine and who have the right balance of how caffeine affects their brain receptors as compared to how caffeine affects their heart receptors, they're going to get the same benefits. So what you people who are saying that caffeine makes you feel calm from a biology standpoint, what I think is happening is that caffeine is having those good effects on your brain receptors that you're going for, but that your, for example, your heart receptors are not so sensitive to the caffeine. So the heart rate doesn't get up and make you feel more jittery in terms of the sleep that may also have to do. So some people who take Ritalin and Adderall, they actually feel like if they take a small dose before they go to sleep, they're better able to calm their thinking, which helps them settle down and go to sleep. It's weird to think of, right? Because most people who take that the stimulant medicines will feel more awake and have a harder time falling asleep, just like with caffeine. But for some people with the stimulant medicines and with the caffeine, it helps them settle down and kind of calm their thoughts and go to sleep better. And I think that it's probably from just not having a thousand things jolting around your brain, but being able to kind of settle down and do your bedtime routine and just be a little calmer. Great question, though.
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Wonderful. Thank you. That makes a lot of sense. So we have a question, some questions about somewhat opposite experience of someone with caffeine. And this viewer writes in to say, I love to drink an occasional coffee or other drinks that contain caffeine. It makes me feel good, alive, focused for about 30 to 60 minutes. Then comes a bad crash, leaving me irritable and anxious. Do I need to abandon drinking caffeine altogether because of this crash, or is there something I can do?
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Well, that's a great question. What's happening in your body is that your enzymes that are metabolizing the caffeine, they're just like making it force out of your body at a faster or steeper rate than average. And the effect on your brain is what you describe feeling lousy. So what I would ask you is, why are you doing that? Is that for just those first couple of hours? And if that's the case, either you're going to be sentenced to drinking the coffee every couple of hours, you know, to maintain the input into your body so that your enzymes are not getting rid of it quite in the same way, or, you know, if you're somebody who has ADHD and you're thinking about ADHD medications, you could try that. You could also potentially try, and I don't know if this will work or not, switching from the kind of caffeine intake you are taking, let's say it's coffee, to something like tea, which is a slightly different chemical that works similarly. So, you know, you have different options.
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Well, that leads perfectly to my next question because we have a lot of viewers asking about differences in the vehicle of the caffeine, wondering, does the vehicle for the caffeine impact its risks and benefits? So is Matcha going to be different from black tea versus coffee versus espresso, you know, versus lots of people are asking about mushroom coffee. Are there, besides the amount of caffeine contained here, which is probably available to be identified, is the vehicle somewhat of a factor in terms of how the effects that it will have.
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So probably the vehicle is not a factor. So let's just say that if you have caffeine, let's just use round numbers. 100 milligrams of caffeine in coffee versus 100 milligrams of caffeine in matcha. 100 milligrams is 100 milligrams. However, matcha may have slightly different chemical composition of caffeine or caffeine related molecules. So I, earlier in the talk, I showed you the molecule of caffeine. There are some variations of that molecule that might be different in the different beverages. And even in different kinds of coffee, there might be different, different molecules as well. So what I would also say though is, let's say if you have 100 milligrams of caffeine in a beverage and you take the same molecules and put them in a pill, you're probably going to get the same effects. It's, you know, there may be slight differences in terms of how your body absorbs what you are doing. And even slight differences can have differences in, you know, the effects of the caffeine. But generally it's not the vehicle, except for the fact that different forms of caffeine may be in the different vehicles.
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Okay, got it. So parents of children are asking if you have a sense of, at what age is it okay to give caffeine to our kids?
- [50:32]
A
So I guess what I'm thinking is like, why would you do that? Because at no age is it acceptable to give caffeine to make you be awake because you didn't get enough sleep the night before. So if the purpose of giving caffeine to a child is to try to make up for the child not getting enough sleep, that's not a good, that's not a good use of caffeine. And I would not recommend that adults make their own choices regarding that. But as we saw in a previous slide, getting sleep is the best way to get the cognition effects from that you're trying to use the coffee for. So getting sleep is more effective than taking coffee. So let's sort of say that if the purpose of giving the caffeine is that you're trying to get your kid more awake in the morning, we want to get that kid some sleep. If the purpose of caffeine, I mean, you know, if the kid wants to taste the coffee, it's probably, you know, if you're doing it for taste, you know, you just want to keep the side effects low. So, you know, If a kid wants to have a soda for taste, you know, we don't want to encourage that because generally soda is a really bad habit for people to get into for many reasons, including weight management. But, you know, as long as they're not staying awake or being nasty after they have the soda, then it's your choice as a parent if you're doing that to try to treat the kid's adhd. My message from this talk is that there are, there's probably no benefit to using caffeine for adhd. Yes, it could work, but it has a higher chance of having side effects. So if the purpose of giving caffeine to your child is to improve adhd, the stimulant medicines are likely going to be a lot more efficient for that purpose.
- [52:53]
B
Okay, thank you. That was really clear and thoughtful and very helpful. So graduating to teenagers. An audience member, a parent of a teen, has noticed that pro caffeine culture, as they call it, like the popular drinks at Starbucks and the no food, no sleep, just caffeine memes common in gamer culture, make my teen think that caffeine is just part of a cool lifestyle and identity. How can I counteract this and talk to my teen about healthy caffeine limits? Any advice?
- [53:35]
A
Oh, my goodness. Talking to teens is an art form in and of itself. And so, so, you know, it's hard to answer your questions specifically, but, you know, I think I would try to go personally for the everything in moderation type of approach, which is, you know, you're probably not going to be successful in banning all caffeine from your teen if your teen is starting out with an all caffeine wish. But, you know, you could try to sort of promote good sleep, you could try to promote good eating habits and, you know, the purposes of that. Exercise and gamers, please. I gotta tell you that these gamers are not getting any exercise half the time. So, you know, trying to promote healthy habits in your teen and, you know, try to, I think if the kid is looking for a healthy mindset, then they're naturally going to reduce some of the caffeine use because you can't have so much caffeine and also sleep for most of us. So, you know, teens, what are you going to say? They do stupid things, they think in stupid ways sometimes. So there's only so much you can do. But if your teen really does do that, I don't know, maybe some people are like, sure, don't eat, have all this caffeine, see how you feel for a few days. You Know your teen is not going to feel well, do well or be well on that. On that combination. Got it.
- [55:28]
B
So we're getting a bunch of comments about caffeine and headaches, and some people are saying that caffeine gives them a headache, as you mentioned, can happen. Other audience members are saying that caffeine improves their headaches, including their migraines. Have you found this to be true?
- [55:48]
A
Yes, and yes. So some of the people who are getting, who are using caffeine to treat their headaches, some of them may be treating caffeine withdrawal, which some people are very sensitive to. So, you know, they don't have to develop a 30 year caffeine habit in order to develop caffeine withdrawal. They might, you know, develop a caffeine habit. Sorry. They might develop headaches if they withdraw their coffee after just a couple of weeks. So, you know, overnight their caffeine levels in their bodies are dropping. If they don't take their coffee in the morning, boom, headache time. So that might be one of the things that's going on in terms of treating sort of daily headaches with caffeine. But caffeine also has been a component in some medications that are used to treat migraines and can be effective. Now it's most effective for treating migraines if people don't already have a caffeine habit. But for some people, caffeine helps their migraines. And whether that migraine developed as a result of caffeine withdrawal or whether that migraine developed from another reason like not eating or for whatever reason your migraines develop, caffeine can help you treat that. Okay.
- [57:23]
B
Someone asks, is there a link between caffeine consumption and feeling more hungry or weight gain?
- [57:31]
A
That is not anything that I have personally ever heard or seen. So I'm going to go with not for most people. You know, again, being a doctor and being a brain doctor, I've learned that absolutes are not a good thing. For me to say, no, that never happens. But for most people, that does not seem to happen. You know, it might be part of a habit in terms of, you know, if caffeine, you sit down and you also, that's the place where you eat. It might trigger a habit of eating, but on a biological basis, that's not something that would be common.
- [58:15]
B
Okay, so some audience members are asking for advice about decreasing or eliminating caffeine intake. As one audience member asks, how can I best stop without triggering headaches and massive dopamine lows? So do you have any advice for these audience members.
- [58:40]
A
Yes, now some people can just stop. That could work for you. But I would say that reducing the amount that you have as gradually as you need to, if you want to stop drinking your caffeine or eating your caffeine or whatever you're doing, a gradual reduction will help your enzymes adjust and your body get used to the lack of caffeine intake. So gradual is probably going to be the right thing for you.
- [59:17]
B
Okay, Slow and steady. Well, unfortunately, that has to be our last question. We're out of time. But Dr. Shayette, thank you so much for joining us today and contributing your wonderful voice to this ADHD community.
- [59:34]
A
Thank you so much for having me, and thank you all for listening.
- [59:40]
B
Thanks also to today's listeners. If you'd like to access the event resources, visit attitudemag.com and search podcast number 544. The slides and recording are posted a few hours after each live webinar. If you're listening in replay mode, simply click on the episode description. Please know that our full library of Attitude webinars is available as a podcast. It's called the ADHD Experts Podcast and it's available on most streaming platforms. We hope to see you again next week for our free webinar on the link between ADHD and inflammatory disorders. Make sure you don't miss future Attitude webinars articles or research updates. Updates by signing up to receive our free email newsletters@attitudemag.com newsletters thank you. For more Attitude Podcast and information on living well with attention deficit, visit attitudemag.com.
- [60:44]
A
That'S a D D I T U D e m a g.com.
- [60:52]
B
Foreign.
- [60:56]
C
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