Teenagers Who Stay Up Late Tend To Drink More Coffee
Most teenagers turn to coffee when they want to stay up late at night
Teenagers are highly consuming their time and in order to solve all their problems, they sleep less. Thus, in order to stay up more, they drink a lot of coffee.
A new study has shown that children who go to bed really late, sleep less. That’s because they use more caffeine. According to Christina Calamaro, PhD, who is studying sleeping problems and obesity in children, is working with parents in order to see what problems these kids have. Thus, when she learned from the parents that their children were not getting enough sleep, she decided to go straight to the source and to talk with the kids. What she found out was that kids were texting, e-mail-ing, watching TV and playing video games until late at night and in order to do so, they drank a lot of coffee. If consequences of the media on teenagers (especially if used at night) have been studied for a long time now, there have been no studies made that included caffeine as a problem. Calamaro decided to look into this problem too, as she found that there was a strong link between caffeine and the lack of sleep in children.
Christina Calamaro interviewed about 100 teenagers, aged 12 to 18, and what she discovered was that the more these kids spent time gadget-ing, the more caffeine they consumed and the less sleep they got. According to what Calamaro said, eighty-five percent of all those kids involved in the study drank coffee daily and about 11 percent drank more than 400 mg of caffeine (that’s about 4 espressos). Calamaro also said that kids do not think about calories when they are drinking coffee, as most of them would not order a sugar-free coffee. “It is not just about caffeine, it’s about calories,” she said. “When was the last time you saw a teenager walking into Starbucks and ordering a (no-calorie) espresso? It’s usually a triple shot latte frappe.” Christina Calamaro also said that she would also like to explore how the lack of sleep can influence decision-making in a teenager’s life. Given that this period of their lives is probably the hardest, they need their sleep. Furthermore, there is also the risk of being depressed while passing through this teenage stage and the lack of sleep can make things even worse.11
