Friday Rant - Caffeine, Beverages, and Sleep

Why is it that all the really tasty non-alcoholic beverages seem to have caffeine? Coke (Cherry Coke is my fave and they don't make that sans caffeine), chai (you can occasionally find it without caffeine, but it's not usually as good), coffee, and tea (drinking looseleaf tea, it's amazing how few options there are for decaf, unless you want to decaf it yourself).

I drink lots of water, but that's because I'm prone to dehydration, not because I like the taste. And the caffeine lobby has even gotten its hooks into water now, with this product called Water Joe. I remember seeing a booth plugging caffeinated water when I was in college and thinking WTF? My reasoning was, if I'm going to deal with caffeine (given it gives me big withdrawal headaches), then I might's well drink something that tastes good. But I suppose the site is right that for people who are just looking for that caffeine IV, they don't necessarily need all the sugar and calories too.

I don't drink much juice (thankfully, given my tooth enamel situation), or soda (even of the decaf kind). So basically, my options are water, decaf tea and the occasional ginger ale. But I love me the caffeinated drinks, I do I do.

And why is this? Why is there such a dearth of tasty decaf options, especially for hot drinks? Decaffing doesn't change the taste of tea, so there's really no reason for that. Not a big fan of the taste of coffee. Soda does taste different when decaf, does anyone know why that is?

And here's the problem - we're a notoriously sleep-deprived culture. Kids in college consider it almost a badge of honor to pull an all-nighter. If you comment on how much a co-worker is yawning, they'll almost proudly say that they only got three hours of sleep because of such-and-such. And the rise of energy drinks only fuels people to stay awake longer to squeeze those 26 hours out of the day.

Our culture runs on caffeine. Honestly, it's not natural to see, when you get on an airplane at 11am, that half the plane drops right off to sleep. Our bodies evolved to respond to sunlight, to wake when it comes up, and go to sleep when it goes down. And while that's not practical (especially in the winter months when it gets dark at 4:30), it's also not practical health-wise to force our bodies to stay up into the wee hours, sleep for four hours, then set the alarm clock across the room on super-blast until we are able to crack open sleep-deprived lids.

I was once seriously asked what I could possibly be doing at home at 11p on a Saturday night, and received a very puzzled look when I replied that I would be sleeping. Not to say that I'm always so virtuous (trivia Tuesdays and kickball Wednesdays being a big exception), but if I don't have plans, then I'm likely to start meditating around 10-something and I'm in bed by 11.

Check out this wikipedia page on the effects of sleep deprivation on the body. I also saw a 60 minutes episode about sleep, and in one of the studies, they'd deprive a boy of sleep by subtly taking him out of REM over and over. After a few days, his thinking had slowed down and he had reached a near diabetic state. Another test subject showed obvious difficulty in having a normal, thoughful discussion, but thought that she would be able to drive just fine. Because we're all so used to sleep deprivation, we don't really realize the effect that it has on our bodies. We just gulp some caffeine, blast the AC, open the window, and hope we don't fall asleep.

I don't have anything against caffeine. I wish I could drink it more, since so many of the drinks I like seem to have it. But it seems to be the cure-all in our society. Have a headache? Drink a coke. Falling asleep at your desk? Have some coffee. Need to get through a night of clubbing? Have a rum and coke. I'm for moderation in all things, but this country has a caffeine addiction to fill the gap for our breakup with sleep. I'd rather drink the caffeinated beverage because I want it and like the taste of it, rather than just because it's going to wake me up, or because it's going to stave off the inevitable caffeine headache.

Crazy for tea, but not for caffeine

So I don't react all that well to caffeine. I love caffeinated beverages, but apparently, they don't really love me. I'm still waiting for a caffeine-free coke that tastes the same as a regular coke, but it just isn't quite there yet. Better for me (and for my bones, and my waistline) that I don't partake of the soda anyway.

But I do drink tea every morning, and there is a serious dearth of tasty decaf teas out there (I buy looseleaf tea from Tealuxe, rather than the supermarket). A couple months ago, I bought a slew of yummy teas (mostly caffeinated) from Tealuxe, but then they started to give me headaches on the weekend, for one, so I cut back. But they're tempting me, sitting in that drawer next to me at work and calling to me. So I decided to test out a potentially apocryphal theory I'd heard that when you steep tea for 30 seconds, it leaches out the caffeine, then you pour out the water and steep it again.

And so far, good to go. I googled it, and it turns out not to be apocryphal. Caffeine does, in fact, leach out within the first 30 seconds.

Do any of you have work-around solutions you've used for you favorite food/drink that doesn't sit right with you?

Tea - the other morning drink

I'm a tea drinker. I'll drink coffee on occasion, if I have a headache and need caffeine to get rid of it, or if tea isn't available. But tea is my caffeine addiction of choice (and given how sensitive to caffeine I am, it does in fact become an addiction. Blast those no-caffeine headaches!). I've even gone so far as to buy an individual teapot with a mesh insert-thingie to steep loose-leaf tea at work. Tealuxe is the brand currently overflowing the food drawer at work, with flavors ranging from Tra Que Chai (far and away my fave) to peach rooibos (strange after flavor) to pumpkin chai (fine, but probably won't order it again). I've also found quite a few flavors of Stash teas that I quite like (I haven't found any other brand to match their mint tea, especially with a sore throat).

One of my co-workers broke out the smokey chai today, and gave me a whiff of it. And I'm not kidding, it smelled like smoke. Imagine the smokiest smoked turkey you've ever had, and take away the turkey flavor. That's what I'm talking about. Not sure the appeal in that, but to each their own, I say.

I also add milk and sugar to my tea. I'd like to be able to say I could drink tea "black" because it's so much more healthy that way. Maybe it's my English heritage that I've got to muddle it up with milk (if I were to get really crazy I'd get a milk steamer since it's soooo much better that way, but seeing as they give us those free little individual packages of milk at work, I'll just stick with that...). I've researched Splenda online about health risks, but I think it's just one of those things that's still pretty new so who knows. I may switch to Stevia, which is a natural product made from plants. Anyone tried it? Is it as tasty as sugar?

Interesting factoid about tea: when I was in France, I asked for "decaffeinated" tea. They looked at me like I had three heads, then told me that tea does not ever have caffeine. At this point, I'm thinking "wtf?" Well, apparently, tea and coffee have separate words for caffeine in France - caffeine is only in coffee (this is where I had the "duh" moment, because of the prefix of the word), whereas tea has theine (accent aigu on the first "e" - tay-een). For decaf tea, you want to ask for a tisane (herbal tea).

I heard a story on npr last year where they were discussing tea grown in China (this was even before all the other health scares about tainted drugs and about the same time as the tainted dog food). The story discussed the short cuts taken by some of the tea drying factories - the tea leaves were grown organically, but then hung to dry with car exhaust fumes spewed over them to speed the process (and they can still claim it's grown organically). The hard part of it is that when you look at a box of tea, it tells you where it was packaged, but not where it was grown. That's what I like so much about Tealuxe, they tell you what country all their tea comes from.

And while it looks like coffee isn't the big evil it's been made out to be for so many years, tea has all those antioxidants and anti-cancer properties. So go find a flavor you like, try not to ingest chemicals from car fumes if you can help it (though I suppose I get a good dose of that every day, given the big city I live in...), and please share your favorites (so I can try them out, of course!).