Caffeine

One of the reasons the Swedish are the greatest coffee drinkers in the world (the only ones that surpass them is their fellow neighbors the Finnish), is that in the eighteenth century, King Gustavo III decided to banish once and for all the discussions and controversy between tea and coffee. Two identical twins had been condemned to die for homicide, but he commuted their sentences to life in prison with the condition that one of the brothers were given several large cups of coffee everyday and the other several large cups of tea everyday. The twin brother who drank tea everyday died first, at the age of eighty-three! 

There has been an association between coffee and a person’s life span a lot. A scientific Russian, Il’ya Machnikov, was convinced that coffee had played an important role in the lives of a good number of Russian centenaries. Isabel Durieux of Savoya, who lived to be 114 years, has a reputation of drinking 40 small cups of coffee a day.

The effect of caffeine is to stimulate the central nervous system, which causes the heart rhythm to increase slightly and the blood vessels dilate. Half a cup of coffee has around 100 milligrams of caffeine, which is the same as a can of coca cola, while tea contains 70. If it is drunken moderately, this stimulation is generally considered beneficial, but an excess of it can have a toxic effect.

Since caffeine has stimulating power and sharpens the senses, instead of increasing them like alcohol does, coffee has always been the preferred drink of thinkers, intellectuals and writers. Balzac for example, who used to drink around 20 to 30 cups a day said that it made ideas start to move like the battles of the Great Army. Voltaire said that if coffee was poison, it would have poisoned him over 50 years ago since he was not dead yet.

Napoleon who was aware that coffee was much better than alcohol for his troops, made coffee the official military drink and said that strong and an abundant amount of coffee woke him up. He said it gave him a warm and unusual strength, and that it was a pain that was not exempt from pleasure. And he said he preferred to suffer than to be insensible. After the First World War, an American said that coffee, bread, and bacon had been the three essential nutritional elements that had won the war for their allies. 

A lot of the accusations that were brought up against coffee in the past were promoted by certain interested contrary sectors. Coffee has been attributed as an aphrodisiac but in Marsella, around the seventeenth century, the wine commerce was quick to circulate a story from Persia that affirmed that coffee caused impotence. It was said that one of the Persian kings had drunken so much coffee that he had lost all his interest in women. One day the queen saw some men castrating a horse, and asked them why they were doing that, they said that the horse had become too excited and difficult to work with so many female horses around. To which she responded that it would have been easier to just give the horse a lot of coffee to drink. Although this is a surprising story, it caused a disastrous effect on the coffee business with all the French men in the South.

In the same way that some people were able to resist alcohol better than others, the amount of coffee that one can drink without it adversely affecting the body depends entirely on each individual. Obviously also depending on the type of coffee that one is drinking, the time of the day, and the mental state or mood of the person that is drinking it.