You’ve all been there… walking up to the doors of your restaurant at 8am after closing the night before. You stifle a yawn but can feel the bags under your eyes pulling your mind to the sweet realm of slumber. If ever there was a call for serious caffeine infusion, this is it. You have choices and those choices have consequences. Given the number of wing-adding elixirs on the market, we thought a question was in order:
How much caffeine is gonna finally kill me?
The Caffeine Calculator will give you very scientific information on both the caffeine content of your favorite beverages, how much will let you move at super-human speed, and how much it will take to make you expire from over consumption.
We joke because we care. Our industry is one the most obvious places where caffeine abuse is rampant. It’s like having open access to an essential drug with multiple triggers for ingesting the offending substance.
The Caffeine Calculator will let you know how many cups of your favorite caffeinated beverage you need to drink before it kills you. Fun, eh?
But you have ask yourself, do we really need it? Is coffee just a crutch or does it have the potential to keep you going all day? Well, there are some that have compared its effectiveness to ADD medications like Adderall. The overall conclusion is that caffeine is as or more effective and far less dangerous.
To balance that, some caffeine claims can’t be substantiated. For example 5 Hour Energy makes some fairly bold claims about their product that don’t stand up to testing. Consumer Reports did a very thorough piece on the efficacy of the energy shot and concluded it was nothing more than a caffeine boost with no remarkable effects to point to above those in a cup of coffee.
Caffeine vs. Napping
For now you may have to rely on sleep as the most effective method for combating drowsiness and include caffeine when sleep is deprived. In fact, a quick nap is an even more powerful way to respond to the impact of the close/open or a typical Friday, Saturday, Sunday schedule.
Researchers at the UC of San Diego put 61 participants through a series of cognitive tasks, verbal memory, motor skills and perceptual learning to see if there’s a difference between caffeine and naps. They found that although the caffeine takers felt more alert before their tests than their napping counterparts, the nappers outperformed the caffeine takers in both verbal memory and motor skills.
The conclusion is that no matter what you choose as your approach to ward off the cobwebs, do so moderately. Too much caffeine might not kill you, but it sure could make you feel awful. Besides, if you manage your diet and exercise right, you won’t really even need caffeine. Staying healthy is the best method for coping with feeling like death.