Hard to rouse a moral panic about coffee

Swap "coffee" and "caffeine" in this piece for "vaping" and "nicotine", and imagine the outraged calls for tougher regulation.

A nationwide survey of hundreds of New Zealand tertiary students found almost every single one of them consume some level of caffeine daily, with a quarter experiencing "distressing" side effects.

But researchers found most of those students who suffered negative effects associated with caffeine such as a fast heartbeat, upset stomach or an inability to sleep had no plans to stop consuming caffeine any time soon.

The results of the Massey University study were published in the journal Nutrients this week and measured the caffeine intake of more than 300 university students.

Chocolate, coffee, tea and energy drinks contributed most to the total caffeine intake of 99 percent of students, with the median intake measured at 146.7mg a day.

But in some cases, maximum intakes of up to 1988.14mg a day were recorded - almost five times what experts consider the "safe" level of intake: 400mg a day.

One third (34.4 per cent) of caffeine consumers ingested caffeine above the adverse effect level and 14.3 percent regularly consumed more than the safe limit, according to researchers.

If it were vaping and nicotine, we'd have the Asthma Foundation saying these addicts need to be protected against Big Caffeine. But we all know that would be crazy. Vaping is newer though and can be pitched as scary, so it's easier to turn these kinds of things into scare stories.

There are always confounds

Via Barking up the Wrong Tree we find that some of the reported negative effects of alcohol and tobacco on student academic performance may be due instead to caffeine.

Using academic achievement as the key outcome variable, 7377 Icelandic adolescents were surveyed for cigarette smoking, alcohol use, daytime sleepiness, caffeine use, and potential confounders. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine direct and indirect effects of measured and latent variables in two models: the first with caffeine excluded and the second with caffeine included. A substantial proportion of variance in academic achievement, which might otherwise have been attributed to the harmful effects of cigarette smoking and alcohol use, was found to be attributable to caffeine. Evidence was obtained that daytime sleepiness, which was found to be independently associated with usage of licit substances (nicotine and alcohol) and caffeine, may be an important mediator of the negative impact of those substances on academic achievement. Findings suggest the importance of including measurements of caffeine consumption in future studies of adolescent substance use.

The article is available via PubMed for folks with ScienceDirect subscriptions.

Odds that this kind of work leads to calls for regulation of energy drinks rather than easing back on regulation of alcohol and tobacco?

Cargo coffee cult [updated2]

It's not like I didn't know about cargo cults. The classic story has isolated Pacific Island tribes building things that look like runways after the end of the second world war, hoping that the cargo planes and their wondrous riches will return: it's the belief that the trappings of an activity are what brings the benefits. And, you can see how they'd made the mistake: folks built runways, and all of a sudden the planes came. Maybe making more offerings of runways and hangars will bring them back after they leave.

And so it was with our departmental coffee machine. Push button, coffee arrives. It says empty grounds, we empty grounds. Then push button, coffee arrives. That stopped working early last week. After emptying grounds, the machine wouldn't recognize that we'd emptied the grounds and refused to deliver coffee. So we tried cleaning around inside the machine, thinking that some sensor or other up in there must be dirty. And, sometimes it worked! But not always. And so we developed more and more elaborate rituals, trying to make the coffee return. But whenever we thought we'd found the trick, it stopped working again.

The repair guy today tells us that there's a not uncommon electrical fault with the machine. If you leave the grounds tray out of the machine for long enough, it resets itself. So the lengthy cleaning sessions worked, not because we'd found the bit that needed cleaning but because the tray had been left out long enough. And just going back afterwards to clean the particular bit found later would never work because the tray hadn't been left out long enough. We can either spend $500 fixing the machine, or just leave the tray out for 5-10 minutes after dumping the grounds. We've opted for the latter.

Off now to perform the morning ritual...push button, wait for coffee, offer homage unto the machine. Next time it stops working, I'll perhaps weave a little wicker coffee cup to put beside the machine to encourage it.

Update: I'd forgotten how much worse that machine's coffee is compared to the stuff I've been buying at the shoppe downstairs. Sigh.

Further Update: Perhaps if I leave gold coins beside the machine, it'll make better coffee. I give money downstairs to get better coffee...