Or, how addicted are you? At the ripe old age of sixteen, I myself am helplessly addicted. Cup of tea or coffee (preferably tea, for some reason) in the morning, iced tea with lunch, and anywhere between 1-4 more cups of caffiene laden beverages throughout the night (depends on homework level, really).
Soo…is it healthy? Is it advisable? A habit? Is your mug an extension of your hand? Do tell!
Well my source of caffiene of choice is usually SoBe adrenaline rush,
kind of like Red Bull but I prefer the taste. If I drink too much coffee it gives me indigestion. Though Turkish coffee is to kill for when available (especially the Beduin way without sugar).
I don’t think it is healthy to get too much caffiene, though I have never had a bad reaction from it I believe when people say too much is bad.
Cheers, Bippy
Tea, tea, and more tea. 4 large pots = approx. 16 cups daily.
Went off coffee 25 yrs ago (showing my age somewhat here) when it began to rack up my stomach.
This may be lunacy but so be it. At least we know it doesn’t kill you within 25 years if the rest of your life is reasonably healthy. Besides, I get to visit Elysium twice a day!
The first cup moistens my lips and throat; The second cup breaks my loneliness; The third cup searches my barren entrail but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs; The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration-all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores; At the fifth cup I am purified; The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals. The seventh cup-ah, but I could take no more! I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves. Where is Elysium? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.
-Lu Tung (Chinese poet during T’ang Dynasty) “Tea-Drinking”
Tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervouse sensibilities…will always be the favored beverage of the intellectual.
-Thomas DeQuincy (1875-1959) Confession of an English Opium Eater
Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea! How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea.
-William GladstoneThat much caffiene is not healthy especialy when you are having it so late in the day. Tea is actually very good for you, or at least green tea is. Coffee isn’t bad for you, but it’s not a health food either. When you start adding tons of cream and sugar, then it does turn into lots of empty calories.
I love coffee. I usually have between 3 and 4 cups in the morning. A lot I know, but I used to work in a coffee shop and don’t even want to tell you how much I had then. I have a latte’ 2 or 3 times a week, but those can get expensive and I don’t get them with nonfat milk. Coffee is one of my favorite things and since it has very few calories, I alow myself to indulge.
The amount of caffiene you are consuming does not sound healthy at your age. I bet you are having trouble sleeping which can be really bad a 16 because your body needs more sleep than, say, me who is 21. I would just stop drinking it after 2 or 4 pm depending on what time you go to bed.
On a side note. When I said tea is good for you I wasn’t descriptive enough. Green tea contains antioxidents, and I think most other teas to as well but I’m not sure. However, this does not include those canned iced teas that are full of sugar. Often times they hardly contain any tea at all but are artificialy flavored. Just something to keep in mind.
I have to have the big, strong cup in the morning. After that, I sometimes have tea in the afternoon, or a cup of decaf for the placebo effect. I didn’t get my coffee today, and my brain just never functioned quite right all day.
Sounds like you might be overdoing it, though.
I do either coffee or tea. Lately, though, I’ve been doing green tea with honey, up to 4 16-ounce cups a day.
Wimps. 
I do the Dew, baby.
Espresso. At least 2 shots a day. I don’t care for coffee. But good espresso with a freshly brewed crema froth is to die for. I’ve tuned my espresso maker to do it almost perfectly.
If not espresso, I’ll settle for Constant Comment Tea. But it’s just settling for.
On rare occasions, I will savor a piping hot Lapsang Souchong tea. It is to other teas what espresso is to coffee.
32 ounces of Diet Coke for lunch every day.
Sometimes I’ll also keep some Diet Brisk Tea or Diet Mountain Dew at home in the fridge, but I’ll maybe drink a can every other day at most.
But God forbid I skip the 32 ouncer!
I probably average 4+ cans of Mountain Dew a day. Sometimes a couple of Cokes in there too. Recently I have been trying to switch to coffee so I don’t get all that sugar. I find that 6 cups of coffee in the morning (as measured by my coffee pot) gets me going. If I go w/o some source of caffiene for more than 24 hours I develop severe headaches and my normaly unpleasent personality gets down right mean and cruel. I would say I have a severe physical addiction, but I’m cool with that.
Jolt. Two 20oz. bottles for breakfast just this morning. It tastes different with high fructose corn syrup than pure sugar.
Damn you ADM.
I still drink it.
Around 120-144 oz. of Coke a day, if I can get it. I’m probably getting less caffeine than most people in this thread. 
Major coffee fiend here, especially when I am modeling for the Disney Animation Studios. You see, they have a machine that offers free coffee, just outside the classroom. So after two to three hours of standing/sitting/lying down, I walk out of there with two triple espressos (plus “non-sugar sweetener”) along with my bag of props: if I had two more hands, I’d have two more cups. Certainly wakes me up again and gets me going for the day.
On a regular work morning, it’s a cup of coffee at the cafeteria at work, plus a cup out at the games (it’s been a little cold in the mornings here in Florida [about 60 degrees or so], so I have to warm up for the day).
I drink one giant cup of coffee every morning, and then several diet Mountain Dews throughout the day.
Cherry coke in the morning and at lunch another two/ three 20 oz. throughout the rest of the day. Call it 100 oz of soda. About 350 milligrams of caffeine a day. But when I was spending 12+ hours at school I had about 1000 milligrams in one day. the average cup of coffee is 100 milligrams
Diet Coke… probably around 70+ oz a day (less than I expected).
I used to live on soda - could go through a 2 liter bottle alone in a couple days. Of course, since this was regular soda, not only did I get the caffeine, but also the calories. Somehow it is so easy not to think of calories when they are liquid. Now I try to keep my soda consumption to 2 cans a day (diet) - one with lunch, one with dinner. I’ve actually turned it into a treat, and not a normal occurrence - if I go out to eat, I will ask for a glass of water and a glass of diet coke - and never allow the diet coke to be refilled. I also do 1 cup of tea in the morning - right after I get to work. Don’t like coffee.
Susan
Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. Strong BLACK coffee, please, no sugar. (I can’t stand the taste of black coffee with sugar in it. It tastes like some foreign substance has gotten into it.) People say coffee is “bitter.” I say if your coffee tastes bitter, it must have been ground and prepared wrong. If you use top-quality organic beans and know how to prepare them right, your plain black coffee should have a wonderful smooth flavor that enlivens the palate and even brings a subtle hint of sweetness. Then it would be sacrilegious to add any other substance to it (except maybe a twist of lemon peel in espresso).
One thing I’ve noticed these days is so many caffeine addicts getting their fix from sodapop instead of coffee or tea. Maybe they feel it’s easier to glug down a sugary, artificially-flavored corporate manufacture than to accommodate their tastes to the more challenging aesthetics of freshly-brewed coffee and tea. Coffee and tea are natural drinks for natural humans, and free of extraneous junk. I shun all sodapop; if I’m thirsty, plain water is all I want.
On working days, I savor two or three 12-oz. mugs of strong black coffee. On weekends, I get by with a mug and a half at home. I think the measurement of coffee in 6-oz. “cups” is long outdated. Everybody drinks mugs now, forget those dinky little cups. My 20-oz. mug was dropped and broken, but it used to contain a whole day’s supply of coffee for me, no need for refills.
The strong coffee I drink is probably double the caffeine of the watery swill that some Americans call “coffee.” One of the new guys at work made the coffee yesterday, and when I tasted it I had to restrain myself from spitting it out. The dude had only used 3 scoops for the whole pot and thought that was enough! What a waste of good coffee! Then he explained that he was on the verge of getting an ulcer so I felt sorry for giving him a hard time, but I advised him he shouldn’t be drinking coffee at all (and let the rest of us there enjoy our strong coffee.)
I only drink organically grown Fair Trade coffee, because 1) It tastes better than just about anything else, 2) it feels so clean going into your body without all the chemical junk sprayed on it, 3) Fair Trade ensures that the workers who cultivate and harvest the crop get their fair share of the profits along with social services and medical care brought to the areas where they live and work.
Some people have stomach problems with coffee, others say it makes them too wired. I have no negative effects from it at all, except that I don’t like the oily residue it leaves in my mouth. So I brush and rinse after drinking it. The other downside to it is evil monster withdrawal headaches and debility if I stop too suddenly.
I like green tea, also.
Has anyone listened to that Putumayo CD, Music from the Coffee Lands? And its companion, Music from the Tea Lands?
I keep various assortments of caffeinated soda in my house. Usually either red or green Mt Dew. I try not to drink more than one can a day of it…and after reading this thread, I feel like I’m being TOO healthy. And when I really really need to get going, I have a can of either KMX, or Venon (they’re versions of red bull…which I greatly prefer). I still don’t exactly get the point of these drinks - they’re twice the cost, and half the size of a regular can…why do I keep buying it?
Black teas also contain antioxidants, tho less than green. But studies have shown that you get the same protection effect from drinking black tea - i.e., there’s a higher quantity of antioxidants in green tea than our bodies can use. (I read this in a respected science mag a couple of years ago, can’t tell you which one now.)
Guess I’m drinking too much tea, I should not still be up at this hour.
I read somewhere else that the half-life of caffeine in your body is approx. 6 hours. That’s why I never have it after dinner.