I love caffeine. It’s
one of my happy things. But I’ve toned down
my consumption of it drastically. I
stopped drinking soda altogether near the end of last year. I’ve had diet coke twice since then as a
intentional cheat/reward. I map out my
intake through the day. I am a cube rat
analyst so I know at roghly 9:10 I’ll have my first cup. Around 11:00 I’ll have my second. Later in the day I’ll have some tea. Decaffeinated if I can find it. After dinner I’ll have a latte as a pseudo desert
and that will be it. Three cups. I stick to this number because I’ve read that
is the safe amount. Of course science,
as it should, constantly updates, negates or changes the findings. I’ll go on the current data and just hope for
the best. Caffeine is from what I’ve
read, and I figure I ingest it so I might as well be aware of it’s affects, is
a pretty awesome wonder drug. It’s side
effects are minimal (if you don’t go taking copious amounts) and it’s
beneficial effects are rather surprising.
Cracked, shockingly well researched for a comedy site, did an article
about it you can read here:
But caffeine has a few pitfalls. Like the fact that it might be synthetic
depending on what your drinking. Which
isn’t terrible except for the fact that it kinda is. The synthetic version still jumpstarts our
brains and bodies into overdrive. But because it isn’t paired down by the namby-pamby
herbal bullshit it jump kicks your teeth into your throat and puts you into
hyper drive even faster than it’s boring all natural tree hugging caffeine you
find in things like guarana. You get the
high faster and you crash sooner. It’s
the street version of caffeine some guy in a trench coat offers in a hushed
voice.
But let’s say you don’t give a shit about chemicals because dammit
you’re an American and American’s don’t read warning labels because fuck
that. Well, that’s pretty stupid. I have two reason why. One is a personal experience and one I read
on the internet. I drove from Savannah
Georgia to Avon Connecticut in a day, with an extended pit stop in Brooklyn, so I could have a full day to recover before
going back to work. During this twenty
two hours I guzzed untold amounts of coffee and soda. To make sure I didn’t dehydrate I had water
as well. Every two to four hours I’d
pull over and move around. At the
beginning I swapped off with my wife so we had two/four hours spurts each. At the end when we were entering Maryland it
was basically the Ben show and I cranked the radio up put on raunchy comedy from
Pandora streaming that would keep me awake and drove until the middle of
night. To put in perspective we left
around 8 in the morning and arrived at our house around 4 the next morning. I was slightly out of it. The last five hours I was practically
trembling from the caffeine in my system I felt sick and twitchy. I awoke in the middle of the night, after
collapsing on the bed and passing out, and had little to no memory of it. Adi explained this behavior to me and I could
just touch the memories through the fogginess of partial sleep. The next day I felt rather awful and did next
to nothing. I’m sure the fast food at
the rest stops did little to help but I blame caffeine for my somnambulism.
Then there is the story of the twenty eight year old moto
cross start whose heart stopped due to drinking eight red bulls. Not a good decision. The red bulls not the hear stopping, I don’t
think that part was a conscious decision.
Caffeine addiction though seemingly laughable is very real
and rather frightening. I had to totally
quite caffeine for a week and the intense headaches were less than spectacular. Honestly the phrase ‘less than spectacular’
can go stuff itself as it is such a light description in its vagueness, only
giving a semblance of sarcasm and no real depth of measure. The headaches were the midway point between
migraines and normal headaches.
But the insidious thing about caffeine is that it is a drug
and it isn’t treated as such. Our
children are ingesting it, in copious amounts and no one seems to care. While caffeine is a super-drug for adults it
might not be the best thing for the still developing neural pathways of our
future generation. But why do we view it
with such blaze acceptance? Yeah, on the
danger scale it ranks way down there with don’t eat right before you swim but
it’s an item that is so pervasive and so widely used you might think some
education might be wanted. But I guess
if we treated caffeine as drug we might end up vilifying it and the food and
beverage companies wouldn’t appreciate that too much. Or worse we’d, shudder, tax coffee. Fuck that, ignore what I was saying.
Ben
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Thanks for posting. You are awesome!