Coffee The Greatest Addiction Ever

Every day the world consumes 300 tones of
caffeine -- enough for one cup of coffee for every man, woman and child. The world's largest buyer of coffee, the US,
has to import nearly all of this as the coffee trees from which caffeine is harvested will
only grow at commercial levels between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn
in an area called the coffee belt. Only a single state, Hawaii, is within the belt. However, the United States is only the largest
buyer because it's so populous.

The most enthusiastic coffee drinkers per capita are, in increasing
order, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Norway and, the world champions, Finland,
where they drink three times as much coffee a day as the average American. All of these
countries are outside of the coffee belt and must import 100% of their caffeine supply. To get this caffeine, first bees must pollinate
the flowers of a coffee tree and these flowers develop into bright red berries. Unlike more
cooperative domesticated plants, the coffee tree does not ripen all its berries at the
same time so they need to be hand picked and sorted.

Once picked, the coffee bean is removed from
inside the berry. This young seedling of the tree is then dried, heated, ground and submersed
in boiling water to get out the precious, precious caffeine. It takes about 40 coffee
beans to make one shot of espresso. But why is caffeine in the coffee beans in
the first place? It's not like the coffee trees want to have humans cutting bits of
them off and committing a holocaust of their offspring.

Well, the trees, of course, don't want or
feel anything and originally evolved caffeine for their own benefit. Caffeine is an insecticide
that effectively paralyzes or kills bugs chomping on the tree. Whether or not the insects go out experiencing
the greatest caffeine high ever is not known. While caffeine is /technically/ lethal, it's
adapted for for 1g bugs, not monkeys 100,000 times more massive.

So you'd really have to
try to win this Darwin Award. But, if you must: to calculate the dose of
caffeine you'll need to ingest to have a 50% of death, take your mass in kilograms and
multiply it by 150mg. Or in terms of coffee, for every kilogram
of mass you have you need to drink one latte to get a visit from the grim reaper. That's a lot of coffee so it's not suprising
that there are no recored deaths in healthy adults from this method and it's doubtful
that it's even possible.

Because, while you're busy getting the coffee in, your body is busy
getting it out by one way or another. The rare recorded deaths from caffeine are
from diet pills, pep pills and crazy people who eat the drug in its pure form. Poison though caffeine is, you do still develop
addiction to the stuff. And it's is a real physiological addiction not a wimpy psychological
addition like people claim for videos games and the internet.

But caffeine isn't heroine -- rapid withdrawal
won't kill you -- it might make you cranky and give you a wicked headache -- but since
caffeine releases dopamine to make you happy and it gets rid of headaches there's really
no reason to ever stop using it. And who would want to give up the stuff anyway?
I mean, aside from converts to Mormonism and Rastafarianism. Caffeine is the world's most
used psychoactive drug -- and with good reason it's pure awesome. It increases concentration, decreases fatigue
and gives you better memory.

This isn't just a placebo -- these are real
effects replicable in a laboratory. And, contrary to popular belief, drinking
coffee isn't a faustian bargain where the devil gives you the ability to work faster
but in exchange makes your life shorter. For normal, healthy humans there are no medical
concerns. Coffee and the caffeine within it may even has medical benefits such as protection
from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Parkinson's.

Caffeine can even get rid of migraines, but
the amount required and the and method of ingestion is... Uncomfortable. Moving right along... You know what else you can thank caffeine
for? A little thing called the enlightenment.

In the 1600s people drank more beer and gin
than water. But with the introduction of coffee and tea, people switched from a depressant
to a stimulant. It's not surprising then that this time was an intellectual boon compared
to earlier centuries. Ben Franklin and Edward Lloyd loved their
coffee for the same reason that modern workers and students do.

It's invaluable for staying
awake and concentrating when you need to finish a TPS report or to get through that boring
physics class. Coffee is the fuel of the modern world, so
go grab a cup guilt-free and get working smarter and faster..