Caffeine: a summary of Michael Pollan’s book
This episode is a complete summary of what I learned from Michael Pollan's book Caffeine, How Caffeine Created the Modern World. If you don't know, Michael Pollan is a famous author who usually explores the food industry. His books are very informative, nonjudgmental, unbiased and he's willing to do experiments on himself. So this is his journey of understanding coffee, where it came from, and he quits it cold turkey and talks about the effects it has on his body.
I read this book solely on Audible. You cannot get it in print, and I listened with my Audible Plus membership - this books came with the Plus catalog, which includes tons of books without having to use your credits for choosing a book. And they also include other podcasts and whatnot. So this book was included in the Audible Plus membership and I'm just saying that now because I have a lot of deals in the show notes here.
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You know, caffeine is a drug. It's a very subtle drug compared to other drugs, and Michael Pollan explains that it alters your state in a psychoactive way.
So, please don't expect this episode to poo-poo on coffee. This is not about drinking less caffeine or less tea or coffee. We love coffee here. I have a whole blog about coffee and travel! My travel coffee blog is called www.brindlecoffee.com. Check it out if you want to learn about how to roast and grind your own beans and what makes the best, most delicious cup.
Moving on. OK, so from the book, first I learned caffeine improves a lot of things is proven to improve athletic performance, your memory. For example, if you learn something and then you drink coffee right after, it will help you remember that thing the next day. It improves confidence. It appears to be protective against cardiovascular disease, Parkinson's disease (those are not 100% sure). It definitely improves concentration and it has been doing that for hundreds of years. Even decaf coffee has antioxidants and both coffee and tea have anti-microbial tannins.
The excess is bad. If caffeine pushes off sleep and lack of sleep is deadly, you do the math.
Without caffeine you have better sleep because the half life and the quarter life of caffeine is very long. The quarter life of coffee is 12 hours. So if you drink a cup of coffee at noon, then a quarter of it is still in your body at midnight. And that's why it disrupts your sleep. It interrupts it.
There are two types of coffee - Robusta - It's easy to grow, that's the strong, bitter, high caffeine, cheap one. It makes instant coffee. Then there's arabica which is higher quality and people started slow roasting it and it became really delicious.
The reason people feel that they need coffee in the morning is because they've already started to go through withdrawal at night the the way that the coffee cycle in your body matches up with the circadian rhythms of your body is wild. You go to sleep and then you start to go through withdrawal. You wake up and you feel foggy which are the effects of the withdrawal and then you drink coffee and you suppress the symptoms of withdrawal. It's not lifting you, even though it has that ability. It's not lifting you anymore because you're basically in a constant caffeinated state if you drink coffee or caffeinated tea every day.
If you're new to coffee, then you get the drug-happy reaction that we're talking about, because you're not used to it. So if you really wanted to get that happy boost from caffeine, you would have to not drink it all the time and make it sort of a surprise.
I'm going to go into some history of coffee. I found this so fascinating. Caffeine helped religious folks do long spiritual practices by keeping them awake. Hindus and Yemen Buddhists in China, they were using coffee to stay awake so they could meditate or pray.
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A Venetian traveled to China and saw coffee and tea being drank hot, boiling, and that was so unknown. People didn't drink anything hot and boiling, but because of the diseases around it was the safest thing to drink. There are more sanitary, even more sanitary than alcohol, convenient for staying alive.
Tea was cheaper than coffee, which made England drink more tea, which they are now known for. The English got their tea from China and China didn't want anything back but money. I mean, what did England even have to give? So, they gave them silver and China made a lot of money.
England would rather trade something and since England controlled India, they grew tea and opium in India (ahem slavery) and then sold AKA smuggled opium to China, which addicted millions of Chinese people.
That brings us to today where 90% of human adults are on caffeine to your coffee. So Michael Pollan called this an unsupervised experiment. For hundreds or thousands of years we've been experimenting on humans with caffeine and nobody's conducting the study.
Caffeine blocks adenosine from being recognized. Adenosine is telling you to go to sleep, but when you drink caffeine the adenosine is blocked. It still exists, but the caffeine is in the way and so you don't feel tired.
Michael Pollan explains he slept extremely well when he was off coffee. It takes a week or two to stop experiencing withdrawal. Then, you could really start noticing how you sleep and how you wake up and you feel completely rested.
He explains what it felt like to go back on coffee after his quitting experience. He said it was like a jolt. It was like cocaine. Right now I'm at the very end of the 21 day sugar fast. If you want to listen to my episode about sugar addiction, it's episode 3 of Learning and Unlearning. It sounds similar because when you go off of sugar, you have the withdrawal of headaches and brain fog. Going back on the thing you are now not desensitized to it, it feels or tastes so strong it really reacts in your body.
I haven’t given the whole book away, so if you’re interested, check it out. It was a two-hour read/listen and, like I said, very interesting.
