Day 27: Caffeine-Sugar Connection I
Thursday, October 3, 2013
8:00 am
I discuss the connection between caffeine and sugar. I propose that allowing the sale of products that contain both caffeine and sugar is the root cause of the obesity epidemic.
Video Summary:
Drink has 2 tsp or 8 grams of sugar. Very little sugar, about as much as you would put into a cup of coffee or tea. Yesterday I finished Lustig’s Book “Fat Chance” I mentioned at the end of the video I had an idea on how to minimize consumption of sugar in America and the world.
I got a couple of books on the history of sugar. The first “The History of Sugar” is a 150 year old book I checked out from my local athenaeum. Its interesting to read the history of sugar from a time period when slavery had just ended in the 1860s. As I had mentioned in my caffeine videos, sugar and coffee were heavily dependent on slave labor. Also the book was written before the introduction of Coca-Cola in 1886. Its interesting how histories are often written right before an explosion in activity in a particular subject (the same happened with a series of caffeine histories written about a decade ago, right before the caffeine mkt. exploded)
In 1886 Coca-Cola was invented, and this totally changed the demand for sugar. The combining of caffeine and sugar (and cocaine originally) proved to be a very popular beverage. An interesting quote from the book “in 1563 Hawkins the Navigator brought sugar to England from the island of St. Domingo, but it was not until the introduction of tea and coffee that sugar came into general demand.”
It seems to me that the intersection of caffeine and sugar is where the biggest bang for the buck is in terms of trying to minimize sugar consumption and obesity and diabetes, etc.
Caffeine is sort of bitter in its natural state in tea, coffee and chocolate but when its cut with sugar it tastes good. So combining sugar and caffeine increased the demand for both. This was the first salvo in increasing demand for sugar. The second salvo was the invention of Coca-Cola in the late 1800s where they basically combined sugar and caffeine into a single product. As everyone knows that became a wildly popular product. Pepsi and Coke are now two of the biggest companies in the world.
In the early 1900s there was a big public health outcry saying “Is it safe to combine sugar and caffeine, thereby making this psychoactive drug caffeine available to children?” There was a huge legal case by a guy named Wiley in 1911 or 1913. The fate of Coca-Cola and the fate of the world was determined when Coke won the case and was allowed to combine the two ingredients (The had quietly removed the cocaine by 1903). Ever since this time Coke’s growth has been exponential.
In the past thirty years the obesity epidemic has increased. What was happening with the intersection of caffeine and sugar during this time. First, they started selling cola products in larger bottles. Coke bottles were 6.5 oz. until the 1950s and have steadily increased to 20 oz. bottles today. Second, in fast food restaurants the soft drinks are now available in fountains where an unlimited amount can be dispensed. Third, there are fountains at convenience stores (Like a Big Gulp at 7-eleven) where huge drinks can be dispensed. Fourth, the rise of the Starbucks phenomenon. Starbucks is providing not just good tasting coffee, but drinks that combine huge amounts of sugar and caffeine. Fifth, the rise of the energy drink market in the past ten years. Ten years ago is when I started getting hooked on energy drinks and began gaining weight.
I remember as a kid I would never drink coffee or tea. It seemed like rot-gut or battery acid to me. But I would drink a cola because it was sweet. I think that, over time, caffeine addiction makes the source product taste better. So as you get older you start liking the taste of coffee because you associate the good feeling of caffeine with the taste of coffee. Similarly, int the case of colas, you start associating the taste of that very sweet drink (which you might not normally like) with the caffeine buzz. So colas just indoctrinate us into drinking a lot of sugar.
When I started this program I thought to myself that normally no-one would drink such a sweet drink. But people do it all the time because they’re so used to associating a sweet soft drink with a caffeine buzz. Also chocolate in its natural state doesn’t taste that good but combined with sugar tastes good, and many people become addicted to chocolate because of the caffeine-sugar combo.
So I see two possible solutions: One is a personal solution which is to consider the argument and, if you want to quit sugar and/or caffeine, engage in a program like the one I am doing in these videos.
A second, public policy, solution would be to ban the sale of products that contain both caffeine and sugar (or sugar substitute). If what I’m saying is true, that would end the obesity epidemic. People would be consuming less sugar, because they would no longer associate the caffeine buzz with sugar. Logistically it would not be that hard. All soda manufactures would just remove caffeine from their products (they are just added ingredients anyway). The drinks would taste exactly the same. Similarly Starbucks could still sell all their sweet coffee drinks, they would just have to be caffeine-free. Caffeine could also be removed from chocolate.
Lets assume you still wanted some caffeine (after all everyone would still be addicted to caffeine and as I’ve shown in my videos caffeine is at least 10 times harder to quit than sugar). You could still buy a regular coffee or tea, but you would have to add the sugar yourself.
If the connection between caffeine and sugar is the key, this would solve the obesity epidemic in my view. (There are of course many other theories related to obesity caused by processed foods, fats, junk food, salt, etc.) They do say there is a .999 correlation between soft drink consumption and obesity, however.
Perhaps we made a mistake 100 years ago by allowing Coca-Cola to combine sugar and caffeine, and perhaps that case should be re-examined. The connection between caffeine, sugar and obesity is what I think needs to be further examined.