Coffee: The world's most popular mood-altering drug

Coffee: The world's most popular mood-altering drug

The dual power to counter physical fatigue and increase alertness is part of the reason caffeine ranks as the world's most popular mood-altering drug, eclipsing the likes of nicotine and alcohol. The drug is encountered not just at the soda fountain or the espresso bar but also in diet pills and pain relievers. It is the only habit-forming psychoactive drug we routinely serve to our children (in all those sodas and chocolate bars). In fact, most babies in the developed world enter the universe with traces of caffeine in their bodies, a transfer through the umbilical cord from the mother's latte or Snapple.

Caffeine's pervasiveness is a cause for concern among some scientists and public health advocates, but that hasn't dampened its popularity. Sales of Red Bull and copycat energy drinks with names like Red Devil, Roaring Lion, RockStar, SoBe Adrenaline Rush, Go Fast, and Whoop Ass are booming. Meanwhile new coffee shops are opening so fast all over the world that even the most dedicated devotee of the triple-shot, no-foam, double-caramel, skinny macchiato can't keep track. Every working day, Starbucks opens four new outlets somewhere on the planet and hires 200 new employees. There's a joke in many cities that Starbucks is going to open a new store in the parking lot of the local Starbucks, but this is not true. Yet.

It was less than 200 years ago that people first figured out that the buzz they got from coffee and tea was the same buzz, produced by the same chemical agent. An alkaloid that occurs naturally in the leaves, seeds, and fruit of tea, coffee, cacao, kola trees, and more than 60 other plants, this ancient wonder drug had been prescribed for human use as far back as the sixth century B.C., when the great spiritual leader Lao-tzu is said to have recommended tea as an elixir for disciples of his new religion, Taoism.

But it wasn't until 1820, after coffee shops had proliferated in western Europe, that a new breed of scientist began to wonder what it was that made this drink so popular. The German chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge first isolated the drug in the coffee bean. The newly discovered substance was dubbed "caffeine," meaning something found in coffee. Then, in 1838 chemists discerned that the effective ingredient in tea was the same substance as Runge's caffeine. Before the end of the century the same drug would be found in kola nuts and cacao.

It's hardly a coincidence that coffee and tea caught on in Europe just as the first factories were ushering in the industrial revolution. The widespread use of caffeinated drinks—replacing the ubiquitous beer—facilitated the great transformation of human economic endeavor from the farm to the factory. Boiling water to make coffee or tea helped decrease the incidence of disease among workers in crowded cities. And the caffeine in their systems kept them from falling asleep over the machinery. In a sense, caffeine is the drug that made the modern world possible. And the more modern our world gets, the more we seem to need it. Without that useful jolt of coffee—or Diet Coke or Red Bull—to get us out of bed and back to work, the 24-hour society of the developed world couldn't exist.

"For most of human existence, your pattern of sleeping and wakefulness was basically a matter of the sun and the season," explains Charles Czeisler, a neuroscientist and sleep expert at Harvard Medical School. "When the nature of work changed from a schedule built around the sun to an indoor job timed by a clock, humans had to adapt. The widespread use of caffeinated food and drink—in combination with the invention of electric light—allowed people to cope with a work schedule set by the clock, not by daylight or the natural sleep cycle."

Czeisler, who rarely consumes any caffeine, is a bundle of wide-awake energy in his white lab coat, racing around his lab at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, grabbing journal articles from the shelves and digging through charts to find the key data points. "Caffeine is what's called a wake-promoting therapeutic," he says.

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Coffee: Its history and growth

"Pistols for two, and coffee for one." Though nowadays it is coffee for the whole world, and peacefully, too. We have gotten past the combative age,—at least past the age of pistols, and have our coffee without warlike accompaniments ; but, nevertheless, the mention of coffee arouses thoughts and ideas far different from those that spring up on hearing the word tea, or the meaningless one, chocolate. Tea has its history; we can go back to the beginning of written or even of traditional history, and we find the Chinese drinking tea. The Chinese are not mysteries to us ; they were too methodical, and have too much history to be entertaining. They tell us too much, and leave too little for our imagination. Tea, therefore, though one of the most gossipy of drinks, awakes nothing in us save a desire to be confidential, and to chat.

Coffee, on the other hand, spurs us on to deeds. It stimulates the lagging energies with something more than simple cheer. It banishes cold and allays our cravings for food, makes our nerves firm and our heads clear. And for its power we fear it. Perhaps we are more than usually respectful toward it because it has only come to our notice in comparatively recent times, as time goes. And more than that, coffee was first brought from the wild hills inhabited by a wild and warlike race,—the Abyssinians. They must have known of it long before it came to the notice of the Arabs, for it grew wild on their hills, the rocky soil of which is peculiarly favorable to its growth.

In the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris is an old manuscript which contains the statement, that the use of coffee was known as early as 875 A. D., over a thousand years ago. But this manuscript is not explicit, and throws very little light into the haze of romance that surrounds the birth of coffee.

One legend says that when the pious dervish Hadji Omar fell under the ban of the people of Mocha, and was driven forth in the year 1285, A. D., to perish in the wilderness, he roasted some of the berries that grew wild in the thickets, and some of them accidentally fell into the water which he had collected for coffcc drinking. He failed to notice it for some time, and "J^tS; when he did, lo ! coffee was discovered. He stole back into Mocha, proclaimed his discovery, and the Mochans, who knew a good thing, took him back into favor, and made a saint of him on the spot.

Another story gives credit to the friar of a monastery for the first use of coffee. The friar had great difficulty in keeping his monks awake during devotions, and on being told by a goatherd of the exciting effect, produced on his goats by eating coffee berries, he decided to try them on his charge. He did so with admirable results and thus was discovered the great stimulating effects of coffee, which prepared the' way for its world-wide popularity.

A more authentic account is given in a manuscript published in 1566 by an Arab sheik, which states that the learned sheik Djemal-eddin-Ebn-Abou-Alfagger brought coffee from Abyssinia to Arabia, in the neighborbood of 1400 A. D., and still another treatise^ places the date at which the Arabians found out its good qualities, about a century after. Some accounts say that it came direct from Abyssinia or Ethiopia to Arabia, and others give the Persians credit for having had the first taste of our familiar beverage, though I believe it was first used by them for medicinal purposes. Certain it is, however, that the introduction of coffee into the Mohammedan countries met with a great deal of opposition. One party contended that the roasted berry was a kind of coal, and the Prophet had very sensibly made it a law that coal should not be eaten by his people. Another party maintained that it was an intoxicant, and as the Koran prohibits the use of intoxicants, it could not be partaken of by the faithful. However, it was soon discovered that coffee was neither a fuel nor an intoxicating beverage, and so it came into general use. It began to be cultivated in Yemen, in southern Arabia, and for two centuries the entire supply of ihe world came from there. Even today the celebrated Mocha, or Mukha, comes from Yemen.

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Coffee may improve your health and help you live longer

Yes, go ahead and grab that cup of joe, or two, or more. Doing so may improve your health and help you live longer, suggests new research.

In a new observational study involving close to 20,000 individuals, people who consumed at least four cups of coffee daily had a 64% lower risk of early death compared to those never or rarely consumed coffee.

The reduction in risk was more significant once people reached the age of 45, suggesting that it may be even more beneficial to consume coffee as we get older.

These findings echo the recent results of another large observational study, which found that coffee drinkers appear to live longer, regardless of whether they consume regular or decaf coffee.

Coffee has also been shown to reduce the risk of many diseases, including type 2 diabetes, liver disease, colorectal cancer, Alzheimer's and skin cancer, too.

"Coffee is loaded with antioxidants," said Joe DeRupo, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association. "Many are naturally occurring antioxidants found in the coffee bean, while others are created during the roasting process. It's these compounds that science links with positive effects in reducing the risk of several diseases."

Some of the compounds commonly found in coffee "have been related to better insulin sensitivity, liver function and reduced chronic inflammation," said V. Wendy Setiawan, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, and the lead author of one of the recent studies on coffee consumption and longevity.

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Climate change could make good coffee a luxury

Fall is always a good time to create new habits, and coffee chains know this. These days, they are desperately trying to find any excuse to get you to drink their java. Many chains are using National or International Coffee Day (both Oct. 1) as a reason to offer their coffee at a discount, or even for free. For restaurant operators, there is no better hook than coffee to get repeat business. But given what is on the horizon, offering free coffee may no longer be an option for businesses.

Coffee demand around the world is shifting. Europe still accounts for almost one third of the coffee consumed worldwide, but China has doubled its consumption in just the last five years. As for Canada, numbers remain robust, as more than 90 per cent of adult Canadians drink coffee. Another probable factor is the fact that several recent studies suggest coffee is a healthy choice. 

Coffee is the most traded commodity in the world, after oil. Coffee is grown in more than 60 countries and allows 25 million families worldwide to make a living.Despite not being a staple in any diet, coffee is big business. But there is growing consensus among experts that climate change will severely affect coffee crops within approximately the next 80 years. By 2100, more than 50 per cent of the land used to grow coffee will no longer be arable. A combination of effects, resulting from higher temperatures and shifting rainfall patterns, will make the land where coffee is currently grown unsuitable for its production. According to the National Academy of Sciences, in Latin America alone, more than 90 per cent of the land used for coffee production could suffer this fate. It is estimated that Ethiopia, the sixth largest producer in the world, could lose over 60 per cent of its production by 2050. This is only a generation away.

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Caffeine Magazine on Instagram

Having “been quite into coffee” someone suggested Bentley go to Soho’s Flat White cafe, which he describes as “one of the seminal coffee places which at the time was one of the only places doing brilliant coffee apart from Fernandez & Wells and maybe a couple of others.”
 
Realising that the coffee there “was always great whenever I went,” compared to the unreliable standards he found in chain shops, and how much information there was at Flat White - “the baristas were so willing to give me information - and the amount of information they had was staggering!” - it tapped into his geeky side, “and began to tie in. I then looked at the newsstands and saw there were five magazines about carp fishing, 10 about trainspotting and 15 about cars, and wondered why there was nothing about coffee for the consumer - for your average Joe that just loved it.”

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