The World of Caffeine Read Free

began in 1819 when, as Henry Watts reports in his Dictionary of Chemistry (1863), Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge first isolated the chemical from coffee. 1 In 1827, a scientist named Oudry discovered a chemical in tea he called “thein,” which he assumed to be a different agent but that was later proved by another researcher, Jobat, to be identical with caffeine. Pure caffeine is a bitter, highly toxic white powder, readily soluble in boiling water. It is classified as a central nervous system stimulant and an analeptic, a drug that restores strength and vigor. After caffeine is ingested, it is quickly and completely absorbed into the bloodstream, which distributes it throughout the body. The concentration of caffeine in the blood reaches its peak thirty to sixty minutes after it is consumed, and, because it has a half-life from two and one-half hours to ten hours, most of the drug is removed within twelve hours. Other drugs can affect the way people react to caffeine: For example, smoking can increase the rate at which caffeine is metabolized by half, while alcohol reduces this rate, and oral contraceptives can decrease it by two-thirds.
    In the twentieth century, medical studies have credibly linked caffeine to causing or aggravating PMS, lowering rates of suicide and cirrhosis, fostering more efficient use of glycogen and other energy sources such as body fat and blood sugars, improving performance of simple tasks, impairing short-term memory, potentiating analgesics, improving athletic performance, causing insomnia, alleviating migraine headaches, depressing appetite, relieving asthma, and so on. There remains considerable ambiguity about many of these putative effects. For example, some researchers have found that caffeine improves mood and performance only when people are aware that they have consumed it, which if true would mean that even the most widely acknowledged results of taking the drug are simply placebo effects!
    However, if you have any doubt that caffeine is a drug, and a potent one, consider that a dose of only 1 gram, equivalent to about six strong cups of coffee, may produce insomnia, restlessness, ringing in the ears, confusion, tremors, irregular heartbeat, fever, photophobia, vomiting, and diarrhea. Severe intoxication may also cause nausea, convulsions, and gastrointestinal hemorrhage. The lethal dose for a two-hundred-pound adult is estimated at about 10 to 15 grams. Sudden withdrawal from caffeine-containing beverages frequently results in headaches, irritability, and difficulty concentrating.
    The discovery of the enjoyment of coffee beans is credited by one legend to Kaldi, an Ethiopian goatherd said to have lived in the sixth or seventh century, who noticed that his goats became unusually frisky after grazing on the fruit of certain wild bushes.Some say that, in coffee’s early days, Arabian peoples used the drink in a way still practiced in parts of Africa in the nineteenth century: They crushed or chewed the beans, fermented the juice, and made a wine they called “qahwa,” the name for which is probably the root of our word “coffee.” The first written mention of coffee occurs in tenth-century Arabian manuscripts. Possibly as early as the eleventh century or as late as the fifthteenth century, the Arabs began to make the hot beverage, for which they used the same name as the wine.
    In the seventeenth century, at the same time that coffee was introduced to Europe from Turkey, Dutch traders brought tea home from China. In 1657 Thomas Garraway, a London pub proprietor, claimed to be the first to sell tea to the general public. The word “tea” is derived from the Chinese Amoy dialect word “t’e,” pronounced “tay.” In China, tea had been cultivated as a drink since, if Chinese legends are to be believed, the time of the Chinese emperor Shen Nung, to whom the discovery of tea, the invention of the plow, husbandry, and the exposition of the curative properties of plants are