Day 64 – Wake Up And Smell The Addiction

“Being without you takes a lot of getting used to
Should learn to live with it, but I don’t want to”

~ Chicago

193 lbs.

Frak. I’m now 20 lbs lighter than when I entered my teens. That would be really bad if I hadn’t been such a corpulent teen that a friend of mine would run circles around me pretending he couldn’t escape my gravitational pull.

I had my last can of tuna today. I mean that in two ways; one, I’m kinda sick of canned tuna. Two, I’ve run out. A major grocer had been talking about sponsoring my blog and I was considering it (having not drawn salary from my day job since starting this project), but companies take a long time and many VPs to make such decisions.

Fortunately I’ve been calling this a starvation diet all along, so lack of supplies just means its gone from 200 – 400 calories per day to… less than. Nothing most of us haven’t gone through in University when the student loans ran a little lean, eh?

</whine>

Anywho… I’ve written about sugar addiction, and coffee as relates to dehydration, but today let’s talk about coffee as the liquid crack it practically is.

Right now some coffee addicts are spitting out their beloved beverage in indignation at the perceived hyperbole (if they haven’t already stopped reading a few sentences ago). But the daily “pick me up” offered by coffee, that’s so popular that $9.2 billion dollars is spent on it every year in the US alone, is actually kind of a downer.

The lovely chaps at Bristol University discovered that coffee drinkers build up a tolerance to both the anxiety-producing and the stimulating effects of caffeine. While building up a tolerance to Iocane powder enables you to rescue princesses, building up a tolerance to coffee means that the morning ‘perk’ you get out of it is actually bringing you up to the same baseline of perk and alertness as a non coffee drinker. S’true.

Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of Bristol’s department of experimental psychology and lead scientist of the study. Let’s call him Peter Rogers.

“Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal,” Pete wrote.

What they did to 379 adults – half of them drinking no coffee or next to none on a regular basis, and the rest being daily drinkers of the brown bean – is make them stop touching the stuff for 16 hours, then giving them a caffeine pill or a placebo. The few, the proud, the cranky were then asked to rate their levels of anxiety, alertness, and headache.

The second bunch which researchers gave the far more scientific name of “medium-to-high caffeine consumers” (I would have gone with Team Latté) were split; those who got the placebo said their alertness decreased and they got more headaches, but those who got the caffeine pill didn’t.

But  then they measured the actual levels of alertness of the Team Latté members who got the caffeine pill, they were actually no higher than the non coffee drinkers who got a placebo. This, the researchers point out, shows that caffeine only brings coffee drinkers back up to “normal.”

Did you notice the ‘anxiety’ art earlier?Yup – coffee also produces that, too. Interestingly, the researchers also found that people genetically  predisposed to anxiety don’t tend to avoid coffee. In fact, the people who played lab rat in the study  who happened to have a gene variant associated with anxiety tended to drink more coffee than those who don’t have that variant. The  mild increase in anxiety, according to Peter,  “may be a part of the pleasant buzz caused by caffeine”.

So it dehydrates you, can be pricey, and in most cases tastes like crap without calorie-adding cream and sugar. And now we have evidence that the perk-up it gives you only works the first few times. After that, like most drug addicts you’re taking it just to get back to normal levels. So… why do people drink the stuff?