I saw a post where a mom bought her daughter a frappe from starbucks and got flamed because of the high caffeine. why is caffeine so bad for children but not to an average teenager or adult? or do our bodys react the same? Im genuinely dumb and idk
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In short, caffeine affects the quality of sleep and how easy it is to sleep. With children, this affect is much stronger and sleep is extremely important for all people and even more important for children and that is why it’s not a good idea to give children caffeine.
The longer you stay awake, the more adenosine builds up in your body. Adenosine binds with adenosine receptors, which fire and tell your brain you’re sleepy. Caffeine binds to those same receptors and even does it more effectively than adenosine therefore preventing adenosine from binding to them. The effect is that you won’t feel as sleepy as you naturally would.
The half life of caffeine in an adult body is about 4-6 hours which means that even after about 5 hours of consuming caffeine, half of it is still in your body. If you consume 400 mg of caffeine at 2pm, you will still have about 100 mg of caffeine in your body at midnight.
A child’s body removes caffeine slower than an adult body. It is impossible to say how much slower without testing with an individual but it could be dozens of hours, some sources claiming that it could even be as long as 60-100 hours in neonates’ bodies.
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