If you thought you were the only one getting a lot of caffeine from your morning coffee you probably haven’t stopped to consider how much caffeine your kids are getting. Sure, you don’t give them a big steaming cup of coffee before you send them off to school, but they very likely drink soda, and maybe tea, and they eat chocolate every chance that they get, right? While you don’t need to be a food Nazi and stop them from getting any kind of sugar or caffeine, you do have to be careful about how much of those things they get. Caffeine can be very hard on a child’s developing body, and that includes the brain and the nervous system. The US doesn’t have official guidelines about how much caffeine a child should get, but Canada does, and the opinion there is that a preschool-aged child should get no more than 45 milligrams of caffeine each day. That’s about as much as you find in one 12-ounce can of soda or in around six ounces of milk chocolate.

Caffeine is found naturally in quite a lot of foods, and sometimes it is made artificially and then added, so you have to be careful what your kids are eating and how they might be getting caffeine, even accidentally. Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant. At low doses that’s not a problem. It just makes you feel more alert and focused, and it can do the same thing for a child, regardless of age. However, caffeine in larger doses can cause nervousness, shakes, and jitters as well as nausea, gastrointestinal problems, and heart palpitations. It can also raise blood pressure, make it hard to concentrate, and make it hard to sleep. Children need a lot of sleep; more than adults do. If they get too much caffeine they aren’t able to get the rest that they need, so they start to fall asleep during school. They can’t concentrate and their grades start to slip. These aren’t the only problems with caffeine, though, because most of the products that have caffeine in them have other problems, as well.

Children who consume a lot of caffeinated sodas are more than fifty percent more likely to become obese. They are also more likely to lose out on valuable vitamins and minerals because the soda fills them up. In other words, all they are getting is a lot of empty calories that are contributing to an unhealthy diet and an unhealthy lifestyle. That doesn’t mean that children should never be allowed to have any caffeine or to drink a soda, but their consumption of these things should be limited, especially when they are very young. Older children can have more soda and tolerate it better, but they should still only have it occasionally and as part of a diet that has a good balance to it, especially if they are more than normally sensitive to caffeine in any way.

Related posts:

1. Caffeine in Chocolate – Should You be Concerned? Chocolate contains caffeine, but the amount varies depending on the...
2. Caffeine Blues: Ten Ways Caffeine Harms Your Health and How To Kick The Habit Caffeine is a psychoactive drug, the world's most widely used....
3. What Is Raw Chocolate and Why Eat It? Dark chocolate with a cocoa-rich diet works produced. Among the...
4. Would The Caffeine In An Apple Give Me An Energy Crash? If I had an apple for breakfast (and I heard...
5. Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, and the Brain Product DescriptionCoffee, tea and chocolate have a number of...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.