The World of Caffeine (36 page)

Vivarin, which dominates sales, boasts about two-thirds of an estimated $50 million to $60 million market for caffeine pills that are sold through food, drug, and mass merchandise outlets. Additional, hard-to-track sales not included in this market estimate are made through health food stores, convenience stores, rest stops, and college campuses.

Selling drugs, that is, “drugs” in the sense of compounds that can change your mood or even get you high or addicted, may seem like a great business in many ways. But because of increasing concerns about drug use in general and the health of children in particular, the manufacturers of caffeine pills and tablets face a delicate marketing problem: how to promote the responsible use of their products without ever seeming to promote their use by those under eighteen or the abuse of stimulants by adults.

One of the first things marketers do to solve their problems is to determine the profile of their potential consumers. The makers of Vivarin, after many years of experience, have isolated three distinct groups that are good prospects for their product: college students, truck drivers, and bodybuilders. Accordingly, Vivarin’s marketing efforts primarily target them. Irrespective of which of these three groups to whom any given promotional material is addressed, all the claims made on behalf of Vivarin have this common thread: Caffeine can significantly improve mood, briefly deter fatigue, and improve performance as a consequence of these effects. Noticeably absent are any claims that caffeine can augment specific human physical or mental capacities, such as increasing endurance or improving learning skills. The maker’s cautionary remarks to all three groups are also of a piece: that caffeine is no substitute for sleep and that individual responses vary widely, so each person must learn through experience how caffeine affects him.

Alertness aids containing at least 100 mg of caffeine must feature this FDA warning: “The recommended dose of this product contains about as much caffeine as a cup of coffee. Limit the use of caffeine-containing medications, food, or beverages while taking this product because too much caffeine may cause nervousness, irritability, sleeplessness and occasionally rapid heartbeat.”

The college student staying up all night to complete a term paper or prepare for a final exam is one of the most obvious potential consumers of caffeine pills. Because such claims have not received the official imprimatur of the federal authorities, nowhere do the makers of Vivarin adduce the studies demonstrating that caffeine confers limited but significant improvements in the ability to solve math problems or memorize facts. Instead they say only that caffeine can improve moods, including feelings of confidence, and increase alertness, without serious significant mental or physical side effects, and that it is particularly useful in improving performance during “all-nighters.” Vivarin has also tried to capitalize on the nexus of computers, college students, and caffeine by promoting its own home page on the Internet and offering contests and dating services through online channels.

Although many credible claims have been asserted for caffeine’s ability to increase endurance or strength and also for its power to help the body burn fat faster, Vivarin limits its claims to the power of caffeine to help bodybuilders start their daily workouts with an upbeat attitude. The company’s claims for caffeine’s bodybuilding benefits, again, are limited to “producing greater alertness, heightened concentration, and reduced mental fatigue.”

Researchers also have found that caffeine benefits the third group targeted for Vivarin sales: truck drivers and, to a lesser extent, anyone who needs to be on the road for a long time. Caffeine has been repeatedly shown to improve driver safety by increasing alertness. For example, a 1996 study in the
Annals of Internal Medicine
that found coffee-drinking nurses to have dramatically lower suicide rate than non-coffeedrinking nurses also found a dramatically lower rate of driving accidents. Because falling asleep at the wheel causes about one hundred thousand accidents every year in the United States, causing about fifteen hundred deaths, Vivarin has made driving alertness a kind of mission. However, the company is careful to include in its promotional material admonitory remarks from the National Sleep Foundation and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. They caution that highway hypnosis, the fatigue and drowsiness that frequently results from long hours on the road staring at ribbons of highway, is different from sleep deprivation, although the specific ways in which this should alter our understanding of how to use caffeine are omitted. Another admonition is that caffeine at best can create a temporary boost in alertness and deter fatigue for a short time. When a person becomes seriously sleep deprived, it is impossible to prevent the occurrence of so-called micro-sleeps, or brief naps that last about four or five seconds. At 55 miles an hour, this is the equivalent of 100 yards of unconscious and presumably hazardous progress on the road.

Even in this age of the coffeehouse renaissance, caffeine pills continue to be a significant source of caffeine for Americans. Physically and intellectually, caffeine does seem to be the energy booster of champions.

“Café Society” could be given a broader meaning today than it had in earlier times. It formerly designated the clique of fashionable or bohemian loungers who frequented coffeehouses. It could now be used as a name for our society at large, the “society of the café,” where people meet, mingle, hang out, or rendezvous with a date. The leading situation comedies of the 1990s on network television support this view. In place of 1980s shows like
Cheers,
which was set in a Boston tavern, were mid-1990s shows such as
Friends, Frasier,
and
Seinfeld,
in which the characters regularly assembled over a cup of coffee in either a coffee shop or a café, and the show
Ellen,
in which a bookstore café was a stock setting for comic routines.

Behind the scenes and on the sets, caffeine is a vital source of energy for the production crew and actors. According to
Entertainment Weekly,
on
Frasier
the stars were served the expensive Starbucks Espresso Roast, while the extras and crew were offered assorted flavors from the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf. On the set for
Ellen,
the caffeine supply was more democratic: Foodcraft’s Finest Kona Island Blend was available to all. Some sitcom performers think caffeine may provide too much energy and have decided to avoid it while working. “Michael Richards, who bounced off the walls each week on
Seinfeld
as Kramer, abstains from coffee drinking. Imagine what he’d be like on espresso,” an article in
Entertainment Weekly
says.

The idea that caffeine could replace alcohol and that the coffeehouse could replace the tavern is as old as the coffeehouse itself. Coffee earned the epithet “wine of Islam,” and we have seen how in Islamic countries, forbidden alcohol, caffeine was a successful substitute for alcohol and the coffeehouse for the tavern. Although alcohol today is legal in every Western society, there can be little question that, at least in centers of urban sophistication, its regular use is falling into increasing disfavor. There seems to be a general drift away from intoxicants, especially strong ones. An attending phenomenon is the decline of singles bars and dance clubs, in the wake of a new squeamishness about sex. Coffeehouses seem to offer an alternative to the dissolution and dissipation associated with the barroom, while still affording an opportunity for people to meet and converse.

The American coffeehouse is sometimes modeled, with greater or lesser fidelity, on the typical Italian espresso bar. There are purportedly more than two thousand such bars in Italy, and they usually are long, narrow, functional spaces with metal countertops and shelves stacked with liquor bottles. They usually have no stools and few tables and chairs, and the use of the tables they have requires payment of a premium price. The patron steps up to the bar, orders an espresso that comes served in a plain white mug, gulps it down, and leaves. There are no coffeepots in most Italian offices, so these places have a following that their American counterparts can only envy.

One import from these Italian shops is the
barista,
a man who makes a career of running the espresso machines. Increasing numbers of tiny American establishments are opening in nooks all over the country, sometimes called “espresso windows.” One in Washington, D.C., occupies the ninety-six-square-foot space vacated when an elevator was relocated. However, American “designer” espresso bars are more upscale and tend to rely for their atmosphere on such appurtenances as cherry wood paneling and ceramic tile floors. As one Starbucks proprietor said of his company’s cafés, “We want our stores to be an extension of your home.”

There have been few field studies of caffeine consumption patterns, that is, who uses it, how they use it, and how often they use it, especially outside of the United States. However, it is obvious that there is considerable variation in this consumption among individuals and populations.
¹

Some overall observations can be reliably made:

• Age: Caffeine consumption increases progressively with age until stabilizing in middle age and demonstrating a small reduction in old age. This increase of use with age is one of the most bedeviling confounders in long-term studies of the health effects of caffeine use.
  

This cartoon satirizes two aspects of the American coffeehouse craze, spearheaded by the Starbucks outlets nationwide: These coffeehouses seek to provide a comfortable home away from home, and they are turning up everywhere, even where we might least have expected them. (David Sipress, 1995)

• Gender: Most studies find either no difference in consumption levels between men and women, or they find a very small difference, with one or the other sex found to consume more. Of course many such studies beg the question of exposure levels to caffeine, because women on average weigh less than men, and exposure is a function of body weight. Another confounding factor is that, overall, women metabolize caffeine faster than men.
  
• Abstainers: At least 90 percent of people surveyed consistently acknowledge they use coffee or tea. The prevalence of caffeine use is even higher, if soft drinks and other dietary sources are considered. One Australian study conducted in 1983 found that only about 3 percent of the population were actual caffeine abstainers.
  ²
  Another recent study found that 95 percent of Finns and Norwegians say they drink at least one cup of coffee a day. Although no one can say exactly, it is likely that 90 percent of people worldwide are regular, most often daily, caffeine users. Less than 5 percent are abstainers, in the respect that they never consume caffeine from any source. This leaves about 5 percent in the category of occasional users.
  
• Generations: Over the centuries attitudes toward different beverages have varied widely from one era to the next. David Musto, a Yale professor, has identified a seventy-year cycle of oscillations in attitudes toward the consumption of alcohol, a cycle that has been especially apparent in the United States. Most people are myopically oblivious to this long-term pattern.
  ³
  According to Musto, America in the late 1990s was about twenty years into its third era of temperance. Alcohol consumption, which peaked around 1980, has demonstrated more than a 15 percent decline, the biggest drop coming in distilled spirits and lesser decreases in wine and beer. Obviously, we should expect the cyclic use of the major temperance beverages, including caffeinated drinks, to be the inverse of the cyclic use of alcohol. And in fact, caffeine use has exploded in the last few decades, even though industry data indicate that there was a progressive decrease in coffee as a source between 1962 and 1982. However, more recently, especially in specialty coffee consumption, usage is once again increasing, while the decline in alcohol consumption continues.
  

Average Annual Alcohol Consumption in America

Adapted from David Musto, “Alcohol and American History,”
Scientific American,
April 1996.

Today in the United States more than 80 percent of adults consume caffeine on a daily basis. The average daily consumption among all adults is approximately 200 mg per day and among caffeine consumers is approximately 280 mg. Applying the standards and definitions discussed in our section on caffeine dependence, this would mean 75 million people fit the criteria for moderate caffeine dependence.

The average daily consumption of coffee in many other countries is considerably higher than in the United States. The highest coffee consuming-countries, in descending order, are: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and France. All have higher levels than the United States, with Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway boasting consumption levels from two to three times as great.
⁴

The United States’ consumption of coffee declined by nearly 40 percent between 1962, the year in which the highest levels were reached, and 1982, with most of the decline occurring in the first ten years of this period. Because the average number of cups per coffee drinker declined only 20 percent, we know that many people quit drinking coffee entirely. The decline of caffeine intake from coffee was even greater, for in the same period the consumption of decaffeinated coffee as a percentage of total coffee consumption increased from 3 percent to 20 percent. During these twenty years, however, consumption of soft drinks more than doubled, and because all five topselling soft drinks contain caffeine, there seems to have been not so much a decline in total caffeine intake as a partial switch from coffee to soda as the vehicle of ingestion.

In 1996, a magazine called
New Choices
conducted a national survey of the first baby boomers, born in 1946, and just turning fifty. They found that about two-thirds are happy with their sex lives, and the same percentage are unhappy about their career choices. When speaking of drugs, of those expressing a preference, the largest number, 27 percent, cited exercise
[sic],
and the next largest, 25 percent, cited caffeine as their drug of choice.
⁵

Why should caffeine have topped the long list of recreational drugs once popular with this group? For those of the “flower power” generation, now at the height of maturity, whose tastes were jaded by enveloping euphorics and timber-rattling stimulants, common caffeine has reemerged as the drug of choice. No doubt it was forgotten in the wild drug party that started in Haight-Ashbury in the mid- 1960s and eventually made its way around the world and back. To those who binged on methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin, LSD, Quaaludes, or any of a long list of agents used for excitement in the wake of Timothy Leary and acid rock, caffeine did not even rise to the level of notice as a psychoactive substance. After all, it was not only legal and a fixture of the straight, business-driven world, but even the most timid grandmother would take it in her tea.

Thirty years later, the terrible hangover brought on by all that overindulgence has finally lifted. Now people are looking for a different high, one that is enjoyable but safe, one that not only does not destroy a productive life but can actually improve it. That’s why all eyes have turned back to caffeine. As a drug, caffeine works: It wakes you up, improves your cognitive powers, increases your energy output—and yet it is, for all anybody can tell to date, remarkably safe for healthy adults to use in normal quantities.

Some of us still harbor a mental image of the coffeehouse as a den of idle adults, indulging in a relatively innocent form of recreation. Many also imagine that the taste for coffee is itself an acquired one that rarely sets in before age twenty-one. But in fact an increasing number of the nation’s thirty-five hundred coffeehouses are becoming kiddy capitals, attracting unprecedented numbers of children in their early teens, who are, from all reports, consuming coffee in copious caffeine-charged gulps that would give many grown-ups the jitters.

Why the coffeehouse? It is a place that thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds can come to hang out, sometimes into the early-morning hours, talk, watch people, and do so in an “adult” environment that has, at least to their innocent sensibilities, an aura of sophistication. Unlike bars, coffeehouses are open to children because many do not serve alcohol. They offer an alternative to the video arcade, the local mall, or the street corner as a congenial spot to assemble. And where else can a kid go to get a legal high? Children generally are not permitted to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, or enjoy many of the other minor vices that make adult life tolerable. Is it any wonder that they flock to the centers of refreshment that make caffeine abundantly available in a variety of attractive and delicious presentations? Some people are questioning the possible deleterious effects of all that caffeine on their systems. No one really knows if caffeine use in children has any harmful effects, although so far none have been demonstrated. Meanwhile, we can assert with confidence that drinking coffee is better for a teenager than drinking alcohol or sniffing cocaine.

Too Much coffee Man & Klix, the Happy Computer,
cartoon strip by Shannon Wheeler, from a series dedicated to lampooning the effects produced by excessive coffee use. In this cartoon, the user gains confidence in using a computer after drinking one cup of coffee, but ends up suffering from the effects of working for four days straight, presumably as a result of the excessive use of caffeine. (By permission of the artist)