Every day the world consumes 300 tones of caffeine -- enough for one cup of coffee for
The world's largest buyer of coffee, the US, has to import nearly all of this as the coffee
trees from which caffeine is harvested will only grow at commercial levels between the
tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn in an area called the coffee belt. Only a
single state, Hawaii, is within the belt.
However, the United States is only the largest buyer because it's so populous. The most enthusiastic
coffee drinkers per capita are, in increasing order, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland,
Norway and, the world champions, Finland, where they drink three times as much coffee
a day as the average American. All of these countries are outside of the coffee belt and
must import 100% of their caffeine supply.
To get this caffeine, first bees must pollinate the flowers of a coffee tree and these flowers
develop into bright red berries. Unlike more cooperative domesticated plants, the coffee
tree does not ripen all its berries at the same time so they need to be hand picked and
Once picked, the coffee bean is removed from inside the berry. This young seedling of the
tree is then dried, heated, ground and submersed in boiling water to get out the precious,
precious caffeine. It takes about 40 coffee beans to make one shot of espresso.
But why is caffeine in the coffee beans in the first place? It's not like the coffee
trees want to have humans cutting bits of them off and committing a holocaust of their
Well, the trees, of course, don't want or feel anything and originally evolved caffeine
for their own benefit. Caffeine is an insecticide that effectively paralyzes or kills bugs chomping
Whether or not the insects go out experiencing the greatest caffeine high ever is not known.
While caffeine is /technically/ lethal, it's adapted for for 1g bugs, not monkeys 100,000
times more massive. So you'd really have to try to win this Darwin Award.
But, if you must: to calculate the dose of caffeine you'll need to ingest to have a 50%
of death, take your mass in kilograms and multiply it by 150mg.
Or in terms of coffee, for every kilogram of mass you have you need to drink one latte
to get a visit from the grim reaper.
That's a lot of coffee so it's not suprising that there are no recored deaths in healthy
adults from this method and it's doubtful that it's even possible. Because, while you're
busy getting the coffee in, your body is busy getting it out by one way or another.
The rare recorded deaths from caffeine are from diet pills, pep pills and crazy people
who eat the drug in its pure form.
Poison though caffeine is, you do still develop addiction to the stuff. And it's is a real
physiological addiction not a wimpy psychological addition like people claim for videos games
But caffeine isn't heroine -- rapid withdrawal won't kill you -- it might make you cranky
and give you a wicked headache -- but since caffeine releases dopamine to make you happy
and it gets rid of headaches there's really no reason to ever stop using it.
And who would want to give up the stuff anyway? I mean, aside from converts to Mormonism and
Rastafarianism. Caffeine is the world's most used psychoactive drug -- and with good reason
It increases concentration, decreases fatigue and gives you better memory.
This isn't just a placebo -- these are real effects replicable in a laboratory.
And, contrary to popular belief, drinking coffee isn't a faustian bargain where the
devil gives you the ability to work faster but in exchange makes your life shorter.
For normal, healthy humans there are no medical concerns. Coffee and the caffeine within it
may even has medical benefits such as protection from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and
Caffeine can even get rid of migraines, but the amount required and the and method of
ingestion is... uncomfortable.
You know what else you can thank caffeine for? A little thing called the enlightenment.
In the 1600s people drank more beer and gin than water. But with the introduction of coffee
and tea, people switched from a depressant to a stimulant. It's not surprising then that
this time was an intellectual boon compared to earlier centuries.
Ben Franklin and Edward Lloyd loved their coffee for the same reason that modern workers
and students do. It's invaluable for staying awake and concentrating when you need to finish
a TPS report or to get through that boring physics class.
Coffee is the fuel of the modern world, so go grab a cup guilt-free and get working smarter