I don’t know. “NEED” might be a better word, no?
If you can’t imagine starting your morning without a triple espresso shot or at least a hot cup of Joe (see our blogger’s logo), you’re not alone. Eight in 10 adults claim to be consumers.
But a new study suggests that coffee doesn’t really give us caffeine fiends the jolt we think it does – it just returns us to a normal state of alertness after a night of withdrawal.
So why do some people become drawn to caffeine in the first place, and others never touch the stuff?
(More.)
I’m happily in the 20% of non-coffee drinkers (and all caffeinated beverages for that matter).
People start for social reasons. Coffee has been embedded in our culture for a long time. A cup of coffee is a great ice breaker too, just like its evil cousin the cigarette. Most people don’t even like the taste of coffee, at least not the first time. It takes a while before you’ll take it without cream or sugar.
By the time you actually like the taste, it’s a habit. And then you’ve got to have it, else you get cranky a day or two after your last cup. And that’s just pharmacology.
this research was flawed because it merely measured speed of movement in response to simplistic and reflexive action.
as any slow-starter will aver, the benefit of coffee lies not in improved speed, but in improved perception: in (startlingly) enlarged world-view and ability to grasp complicated concepts and larger situations more validly, more usefully, more productively.
as is typical in most research: serious proxy errors. creating serious validity problems.
I’m always suspicious of research whose finding run counter to my [5-7 times daily] experience. And also the kind that says, “Billions of people have been wrong about something very simple for hundreds of years!”
I’m totally with you, though, Alex, that it’s cultural. When I do try to give up or cut back on coffee sometimes, it comes up in a social way (I drink coffee with all my friends and family and wife), and it nixes my plans. I had a semester in my MA program wherein I drank only tea and water (no coffee or alcohol), and it was weird (being American) to say, “Let’s go get a cup of tea,” in a social setting. I have to admit that I caved and went back to coffee before the end of the semester though. :)
Like Johnny, that study runs counter to my own experience and my personal history consuming tea and coffee.
I am a brain cancer survivor, and am currently dealing with a non-cancerous brain tumor. I suffer the occasional seizure, and th eNeurologists have told me to drink espresso, th emoment I feel the pre-seizure symptoms- and if I consume the coffee, both before and after th eseizure episode, I recover faster from theseizure.
I have to say I’m not sure about this study either because there’s caffeine in my migraine medication, and when I do feel a headache or migraine about to happen, coffee or tea does help decrease the pain. When I don’t have any medicine or caffeinated beverages nearby, the results are just devastating. ;_;