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Effects Of Caffeine On The Human Body Essay

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Ever since I can remember I have been addicted to caffeine. It started out with drinking diet coke which was my mother’s drink of choice, and then slowly as time went on it turned into Coca-Cola. I have experienced the harsh withdrawals that come with caffeine like the headaches, irritability, and those lovely morning shakes telling me that I need caffeine. The headaches and the shakes finally got so bad to the point where I needed coke in the morning just to function. At that point I realized that caffeine was probably not very good for me. After learning in my Chemistry 130 class that caffeine was classified under heterocyclic amines and was an alkaloid, the same classification that heroin is under, I finally took it upon myself to really get serious and give up caffeine. What I really was interested in however was how does caffeine affect the human body? Do the positive uses of caffeine outweigh the negatives or is caffeine something we shouldn’t be allowing into our bodies? To determine the answers to these questions we need to first familiarize ourselves with what caffeine is and then compare the positives and negatives of caffeine in order to draw a conclusion. So, what exactly is caffeine, where does it come from, where can we find it and how much should we be consuming?
C8H10N4O2, otherwise known as Caffeine, comes from the family of heterocyclic amine compounds known as alkaloids. Alkaloids come from the end production of nitrogen metabolism in plants like cacao,

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