The World of Caffeine

by Weinberg, Bennett Alan, Bealer, Bonnie K.

  56. Walsh, Tea, p. 234.

  57. Coburn, Coleridge, 1490, 7.40.

  58. The gentrification of the once socially catholic coffeehouse is evident in an account by an Italian traveler, written in the same year (1724), of the pastimes available to the café society. Ibid., p. 74.

  59. Derek Jarrett, England in the Age of Hogarth, p. 202.

  60. Quoted in Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 74.

  61. Quoted in Okakura, The Book of Tea, p. 7.

  62. Ukers, All About Tea, vol. II, p. 494.

  63. Ibid., vol. I, p. 48, quoting Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., London, 1787.

  64. The Literary Magazine, no. 7, October 15-November 15, 1756; and no. 13, April 15-May 15, 1757.

  65. R.O.Mennell, Tea: An Historical Sketch, p. 29.

  66. Ibid.

  67. Ibid. Even worse than the practices noticed in the statute, tea traders blended tea with ash leaves boiled in iron sulphate and sheep dung. See Helen Simpson, The London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea, p. 13.

  68. Simpson, London Ritz, p. 15.

  69. The author is anonymous.

  70. A contemporary doctor who was known for investigating adulterations.

  71. Pepper dust.

  72. Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse, no. 288, “London Adulterations,” p. 335.

  73. Daniel Pool, What Jane Austen Ate, What Charles Dickens Knew, p. 209.

  74. Oxford Book of English Traditional Verse, no. 289, “How Five and Twenty Shillings Were Expended in a Week,” p. 337.

  75. Adapted from M.A. Spiller, The Methylxanthine Beverages and Foods, p. 204.

  CHAPTER 11

  the endless simmer

  1. Quoted in Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 122.

  2. Ibid., p. 106.

  3. Mark Twain, Autobiography, 1924, reprinted in Helen Morrison, The Golden Age of Travel

  4. Timbs, Club Life in London, p. 286.

  5. Wiley’s story is told in elaborate detail in Mark Pendergrast’s book For God, Country, and Coca-Cola (1993).

  6. Quoted in Pendergrast, ibid., p. 112.

  7. Ibid., pp. 119–20.

  8. Harry Hollingworth and L. Hollingworth, “The Influence of Caffeine on Mental and Motor Efficiency,” Archives of Psychology 20 (1912): 1–166.

  9. Pendergrast, For God, p. 121.

  10. “Beverage Marketing,” Dow Jones News, February 6, 1996.

  11. Another high-caffeine soft drink advertisment, which was withdrawn from at least one Akron suburb in response to public displeasure, read, “Gotta problem with the taste of Kick soda? Call 1–800-BITE-ME." Billboards with that piquant message on behalf of Kick were posted in three Ohio communities. A spokesman for the company explained that its intent had been to be tasteless and tacky to attract the soda’s targets market of high school and college men. The telephone number, by the way, isn’t real: It lacks the requisite eleventh digit.

  12. David Ramsey, “Caffeine Can Be Your Friend,” MacWEEK, 7.16 (April 19): 62.

  CHAPTER 12

  caffeine culture and le fin de millénaire

  1. Laboratory studies to date, in which subjects are challenged with larger single doses, shed little light on the ways in which most people actually use caffeine, that is, ingesting it in small amounts throughout the day and taking relatively little after dinner.

  2. M.J. Shirlow, “Patterns of Caffeine Consumption,” Human Nutrition: Applied Nutrition 37a (1983): 307–13.

  3. David Musto, "Alcohol in American History," Scientific American, April 1996, p. 78.

  4. In terms of dollars, coffee, cacao, and tea are each important agricultural products. In terms of dollar value, coffee is the largest agricultural commodity in the world, and it is second only to oil among all commodities. In 1985 the world value of trade in coffee every year was more than $15 trillion, that of cacao exceeded $7 trillion, and that of tea topped $2.5 trillion, with a total world value of these three caffeine crops of near $25 trillion annually.

  5. Mark Schogol, “Personal Briefing,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 10, 1996.

  6. Krapf, Travels, Researches, p. 47. Krapf, who wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century, reports that already by his time, African coffee from the Kaffa region was being exported to Arabia and sold as genuine Mocha. This practice persists today.

  7. Heise, Coffee and Coffee-Houses, pp. 20–21.

  8. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 275.

  9. Frederick L. Wellman, Coffee Botany, Cultivation, and Utilization.

  10. More information about these studies of drinking water is available from Ed Swibas, USGS Colorado District, Box 25046, MS 415, Denver, CO 80225.

  11. His poem “The Caffeine” is widely posted in newsgroups and found in several web pages.

  12. Working Woman, November 1995, p. 100.

  13. International trade in caffeine has become a contentious issue at least in India, where in 1995 the Chemicals and Fertilizers Ministry officials in New Delhi, responding to petitions from Indian pharmaceutical firms, announced duties on imports of both caffeine and theophylline.

  14. The Cathead homepage is http://www.efn.org/~garl_p_s/Cathead/CatheadPage.html.

  CHAPTER 13

  caffeine in the laboratory

  1. Johannes Fabricius, Alchemy, p. 11.

  2. Before Boyle, the Greek philosopher Empedocles had taught that four underived and indestructible substances, fire, water, earth, and air, were the constituents from which all other things are compounded, and this theory had reigned unchallenged since ancient times.

  3. Manufacturer’s Standard Data Sheet (excerpt):

  MSDS FOR CAFFEINE

  1—PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION

  PRODUCT NAME: CAFFEINE

  FORMULA: C8H10N4O2

  FORMULA WT: 194.19 CAS NO.: 00058–08–2

  NIOSH/RTECS NO.: EV6475000

  COMMON SYNONYMS: 1,3,7-TRIMETHYLXANTHINE

  PRODUCT CODES: E268

  EFFECTIVE: 10/25/85

  4. Silvio Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 400.

  5. Jack E.James, Caffeine and Health, p. 81. On caffeine’s slowing of the metabolization of alcohol, James cites J.George et al., “Influence of Alcohol on Caffeine Consumption and Caffeine Elimination,” Clinical and Experimental Pharmacology and Physiology 13 (1986): 731–36; M.C.Mitchell et al., “Inhibition of Caffeine Elimination by Short Term Ethanol Administration,” Journal of Laboratory and Clinical Medicine 101 (1983): 826–34. James also notes that Nash's speculative antagonistic effect between caffeine and alcohol may occur, but if it does, is probably clinically insignificant, citing R.Fudin and R.Nicastro, “Can Caffeine Antagonize Alcohol-Induced Performance Decrements in Humans?” Perceptual and Motor Skills 67 (1988): 375–91.

  6. Richard Gilbert, Caffeine: The Most Popular Stimulant, p. 62. Gilbert states, “Some of the variability in the rates of caffeine metabolism is inherited. Asians, for example, appear to metabolism caffeine differently and more slowly than Caucasians. Some of the variability, however, may be the result of experience with caffeine. Regular caffeine users may metabolize caffeine more quickly, though this has not yet been proven.”

  7. Jack James, Caffeine and Health, p. 81. Caffeine’s ability to antagonize alcohol-induced drowsiness is the one antagonism which he finds the most credible.

  8. Jacob, Epic of a Commodity, p. 22.

  9. Another related theory, of questionable probative value, is that caffeine achieves its effects by benzodiazepine receptors that regulate the activity of GABA (gamma-amino butyric acid), an amino acid highly concentrated in the central nervous system that has a very powerful depressant effect on neuronal discharge. An antagonistic effect on these receptors, by inhibiting the action of GABA, could account for caffeine’s stimulant effect. However, although the antagonism between caffeine and benzodiazepines in vitro and in vivo is clearly established, the concentrations of caffeine reached after coffee consumption leave doubts about the significance of this effect in dietary doses of caffeine.
(Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 401)

  10. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 97.

  11. Bridgette E.Garrett and Roland R.Griffiths, “The Role of Dopamine in the Behavioral Effects of Caffeine in Animals and Humans,” unpublished monograph, July 30, 1996.

  12. Bozidar Stavric et al., Food and Chemical Toxicology, Canada’s Health Protection Branch, March 1988, as reported in article by Boyce Rensberger, Washington Post, April 25, 1996.

  13. For the median values for tea prepared from tea bags of black tea, averages among all brands, see the 1979 study by Bunker and McWilliams, published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. The same study found that the amount of caffeine in tea increases with brewing time and that the finer the particles of tea leaves, the more caffeine is extracted into the cup. The mean caffeine contents for all brews of regular black bag tea per cup were 28 mg for one-minute brews, 44 mg for three-minute brews, and 47 mg for five-minute brews. Black tea contained more caffeine than green teas.

  14. The Republic of Tea Home Page, “Caffeine and Tea: Five Considerations.”

  15. Newsletter, Mountain Bros. Coffee Co., San Francisco.

  16. Shoku-hin 80 calorie seibun-hyo (The Ingredient List of 80-Calorie Foods, ed. Aya Kagawa and Jyoshi Eiyo Daigaku, Women’s Nutrition College, 1980).

  17. Bowes and Church’s Food Values of Portions Commonly Used, by Anna De Planter Bowes. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1989, pp. 261– 62.

  18. Spiller, Methylxanthine Beverages, p. 181.

  19. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 37.

  20. Private correspondence from George Stiper, Ph.D.

  CHAPTER 14

  caffeine and the plant kingdom

  1. Gilbert, Most Popular Stimulant, p. 27.

  2. J.Nathanson, Science, October 5, 1984.

  3. Warren E.Leary, “Caffeine in plants seen as insecticide,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 5, 1984.

  4. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center researchers reported varying results when they gave various mind-altering substances to household spiders, then observed their webs. The spiders exposed to marijuana did the best spinning. Dr. David Noever, head of the research team, stated that the worst web was spun by a spider dosed with caffeine. “Using SpiderWeb Patterns to Determine Toxicity,” NASA Technical Briefs MFS-28921, April 1995, study at Marshall Space Flight Center, Alabama, by David A. Noever et al.

  5. New Yorker, June 5, 1995, p. 34.

  6. Leary (see note 3).

  7. Année Littéraire, Paris, 1774, vol. VI, p. 217.

  8. Ibid. De Clieu’s heroic husbandry has been glorified in prose and poetry by his admiring countrymen. Joseph Alphonse Esménard (1769–1811), a Creole poet of indifferent gifts who delighted in maritime themes, describes his devotion through the dreadful calm, writing that the officer, though parched by the broiling sun,

  Yet does not slake his own consuming thirst,

  But drop by drop revives the sapling first,

  His suffering eased by what his visions show,

  Who from this shoot sees great plantations grow.

  (Our translation)

  9. Spiller, Methylxanthine Beverages, p. 77.

  10. Ibid.

  11. Timothy James Castle, The Perfect Cup, p. 10.

  12. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 284.

  13. Joseph Walsh, Tea: Its History and Mystery, p. 49

  14. Bayard Hora, ed., Oxford Encyclopaedia of Trees of the World, p. 210.

  15. Ukers, All about Coffee, p. 8.

  16. McCoy and Walker, Coffee and Tea, pp. 163–64.

  17. Chow and Kramer, All the Tea in China, p. 92.

  18. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, pp. 39–40.

  19. Chow and Kramer, All the Tea in China, p. 77.

  20. Ibid., p. 214. Perhaps there is something in the water that makes people in the tea trade wax emotional, producing their own versions of “Tea and Sympathy” when discoursing on this subject. For example, when boiling water is poured over the curling leaves in a pot, and they release their caffeine and tannin, this is luridly called the “agony of the leaves” by those in the tea business.

  21. James Norwood Pratt, Tea Lover’s Treasury, p. 212.

  22. Toussaint-Samat, History of Food, p. 305.

  23. Lu Yü, Classic of Tea, p. 21.

  24. Pratt, Tea Lover’s Treasury, p. 212.

  25. Coe and Coe, True History, p. 18.

  26. José Cuatrecasas, “Cacao and Its Allies: A Taxonomic Revision of the Genus Theobroma,” Contributions from the United States National Herbarium 35, part 6. Washington, D.C., 1964.

  27. Spiller, Methylxanthine Beverages, p. 152.

  28. Robert Schery, Plants for Man, p. 594.

  29. Phillips reports an unusual use for the wood: “It is from the wood of this tree that our most esteemed German flutes have for some years past been made, as they are not so subject to swell by using as those made from Box-wood; which swelling often causes a variation of half a note, as after being played on for short time the tone become sharper. The cacao flutes have also an objectionable quality, viz., as they are subject to crack by use, and will not stand the breath of different persons. A respectable professor of this instrument, among other instances, informed us of a gentleman who after having played on a cacao flute for seven years without accident, sold it to a friend, by whose breath alone three joints were split, in the course of a few months practice.” (Phillips, Orchard, p. 71)

  30. Ibid., p. 152.

  31. Foster and Cordell, Chilies to Chocolate, pp. 105–8.

  32. Schery, Plants for Man, p. 316.

  33. G.K.Mumford et al., “Discriminative Stimulus and Subjective Effects of Theobromine and Caffeine in Humans,” Psychopharmacology 115 (1994): 1–8.

  34. Spiller, Methylxanthine Beverages, p. 179.

  35. J.Alfred Wanklyn, Tea, Coffee, and Cocoa, p. 58.

  36. Ibid.

  37. Joseph Walsh, Tea: Its History and Mystery, p. 46.

  38. Maud Grieve, A Modern Herbal, p. 609.

  39. Ukers, All about Tea, vol. I, p. 503.

  40. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Angiosperms,” vol. 13, p. 722 (1990).

  41. Encyclopoedia Britannica, “Kola nut,” vol. 6, p. 937 (1990).

  42. Louis Lewin, Phantastica: A Classic Survey on the Use and Abuse of Mind-Altering Plants, p. 224.

  43. Ibid., p. 223.

  44. Ibid., p. 226.

  45. David Tait, “Konkomba Sorcery,” appearing in John Middleton, ed., Magic, Witchcraft, and Curing, p. 157.

  46. Grieve, Modern Herbal, p. 381.

  47. According to one source, guarana means “to make war” in the indigenous tongue, so named because it was thought to confer strength and valor.

  48. Joseph Walsh, Tea: Its History and Mystery, p. 47.

  49. Encyclopoedia Britannica, “Angiosperms,” vol. 13, p. 753.

  50. Schery, Plants for Man, p. 309.

  51. Joseph Walsh, Tea: Its History and Mystery, p. 47.

  52. Donna Abu-nasr, “Yemen’s Costly Habit: Chewing Khat Leaves,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 26, 2000.

  53. Schery, Plants for Man, p. 317.

  54. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Betel,” vol. 2, p. 172 (1990).

  55. John G.Kennedy, The Flower of Paradise, p. 239.

  56. Marco Polo, The Travels, p. 186.

  57. E.N. Anderson, The Food of China, p. 138.

  58. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Aphrodisiac,” vol. 1, p. 480 (1990).

  CHAPTER 15

  caffeine and the body

  1. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 177.

  2. Ibid., p. 178 3. James, Caffeine and Health, p. 339.

  3. James, Caffeine and Health, p. 339.

  4. D.Robertson et al., “The Health Consequences of Caffeine,” Annals of Intenal Medicine 98 (1983): 641–53.

  5. J.Onrot et al., “Hemodynamic and Humoral Effects of Caffeine in Autonomic Failure, Therapeutic Implications for Post-Prandial Hypotension,” NEJM 313 (1985):
549–54.

  6. T.B.Graboys et al., “Coffee, Arrhythmias, and Common Sense,” NEJM 308 (1983): 835–36.

  7. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 401.

  8. Charles R.Schuster and Michael J.Kuhar, ed., Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, Heidelberg, pp. 315–41.

  9. S.S.Hayreh, letter to Lancet I (1973): 45.

  10. James, Caffeine and Health, p. 293.

  11. A.W.Caggiula et al. (for the MR FIT group), “Coffee Drinking, Coronary Heart Disease, and Total Mortality.” Presented at Tenth World Congress of Cardiology, September 14–19, 1986, Washington, D.C.

  12. D.E.Grobbee et al., “Coffee, Caffeine, and Cardiovascular Disease in Men,” NEJM 323 (1990): 1026–32.

  13. P.W.F. Wilson et al., “Is Coffee Consumption a Contributor to Cardiovascular Disease? Insights from the Framingham Study,” Archives of Internal Medicine 149 (1989): 1169–72.

  14. Siegfried Heydens et al., “Coffee Consumption and Mortality: Total Mortality, Stroke Mortality, and Coronary Heart Disease Mortality,” Archives of Internal Medicine 138 (1978): 1472–75.

  15. L.Wilhelmsen et al., “Coffee Consumption and Coronary Heart Disease in Middle Aged Swedish Men,” Acta Med Scand 201 (1977): 547–52.

  16. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 174.

  17. This effect was so pronounced that it was thought by the researchers to at least partially counterbalance the potentially dangerous cholesterol-raising effects that the study also correlated with drinking non-filtered coffee. Many other studies have confirmed these observations.

  18. Garattini, Caffeine, Coffee, and Health, p. 161.

  19. Ibid., p. 163. Studies in the 1980s by David Robertson profiled the tolerance to caffeine’s hemodynamic and neurohumoral (of or pertaining to a chemical transmitted by a neuron, such as acetylcholine, serotonin, dopomine, or epinephrine) effects among people with normal and high blood pressure. He concluded that, while his study confirmed the moderate pressor effect of caffeine, it “demonstrated rapid and essentially complete tolerance to the hemodynamic and neurohumoral effects over as short a period as three to four days.”