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.

Debunking the Bunk - Coffee

So the common wisdom about coffee seems to be that it's bad for you. Especially if you drink it in large quantities (I've heard tales of people drinking 8 pots a day, or of a girl working in a coffee shop who was admitted to the hospital for heart palpitations after drinking 10 espressos or so).

So not the best idea to drink 10 shots of espresso in a short time. Moderation is key.

But now, the common wisdom about coffee seems to be shifting (at least among scientists who've studied coffee's effect). Coffee's bad reputation seems to be more image than substance. In the past, coffee has been linked to anything from breast cancer to pancreatic cancer to heart disease. One hypothesis for the supposed bad effect of coffee (from this book) is that coffee often went hand in hand with cigarette smoking, and that it was the smoking that truly caused the health problems.

So now we're supposed to just on the coffee bandwagon? What's the deal?

A study cited in Science Daily says that women who drink 2-3 cups of caffeinated coffee a day decrease their chance of death from heart disease by 25%, and decrease their chance of death by cancer or heart disease by 18%. People drinking decaf coffee also had a lower rate of death than those not drinking coffee. Men had neither a higher nor lower risk associated with coffee.

Another study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine (mentioned in this Senior Health article) says that regular coffee drinking of up to 6 cups a day has no negative effect for either men or women.

The Bad Stuff

1. Caffeine can have negative effects ranging from an increase in anxiety, withdrawal headaches, irritability, shakiness, and insomnia.

2. Drinking espresso, French press, or other coffee that doesn't drip through a paper filter can increase your cholesterol by a few points.

3. Drinking a lot of coffee may increase your risk for developing osteoporosis or breaking a bone.

4. Not so yummy flavors, such as blueberry (I swear, one day at work when someone was brewing blueberry coffee, I had no idea what the smell was and I really honestly though that someone had forgotten to take out the trash).

5. If you already have heart disease? No dice. Coffee can increase your risk of heart attack or stroke.

The Good Stuff

1. Lower chance of developing kidney stones, gallstones, Parkinson's, colon cancer, or type 2 diabetes.

2. Less chance that you'll voluntarily depart this earthly coil - coffee (and other caffeinated beverages) often act like mild anti-depressants. Two studies showed that suicides are as much as 50% lower among coffee drinkers.

3. Lower rates of heart disease for women.

4. Yummy flavors such as hazelnut, mocha, pumpkin.

5. Coffee may be one of our highest sources of antioxidants, but whether that's because we drink a boatload of coffee, or that we don't eat enough other antioxidant food isn't specified. Coffee came out ahead of tea, chocolate or fruit on the antioxidant-o-meter. The next highest sources of antioxidants were black tea, bananas, dried beans (do people eat dried beans and do they have the same antioxidant level well cooked?), corn, red wine, lager beer (go flip cup!), apples, tomatoes, and potatoes.

However, the docs don't recommend adding coffee to your diet for health reasons. Because while coffee does have a lot of antioxidants, the other healthy food antioxidant sources (such as fruit and veggies) offer more in terms of total nutrition. And if you're like me and have to add a good deal of milk and sugar to coffee to make it palatable, well that pretty much negates the health benefit, right? Now I want some decaf anyway...

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!).