There is a reasonable chance you may be reading this with a cup of coffee in your hand. Though tea is the most popular drink in the world, Americans drink more coffee than soda, juice, and tea combined.
Given coffee’s popularity, it’s surprising how much confusion surrounds how this hot, dark nectar affects our biology.
Coffee’s Ingredients
The main biologically active ingredients in coffee are caffeine (a stimulant) and a suite of antioxidants. What do we know about how caffeine and antioxidants affect our bodies? The fundamentals are pretty simple, but the devil is in the details and the speculation around how coffee could either help or harm us runs a bit wild.The stimulant properties of caffeine mean that you can count on a cup of coffee to wake you up. In fact, coffee, or at least the caffeine it contains, is the most commonly used psychoactive drug in the world. It seems to work as a stimulant, at least in part, by blocking adenosine, which promotes sleep, from binding to its receptor.
